


standing at the edge of something much too deep

by technosagery



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-16
Updated: 2011-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-26 03:43:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/278294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/technosagery/pseuds/technosagery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shortly after <i>Out of the Blue</i>, Will leaves the Old City Sanctuary. It takes a year, five months, thirteen days and a letter from Magnus to bring him home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	standing at the edge of something much too deep

**Author's Note:**

> The story proceeds on two concurrent timelines: 1) begins a year, five months, and thirteen days after Will left the Sanctuary; 2) begins at the end of _Out of the Blue_ and continues until the two timelines merge. I'd hoped to use different fonts to set them off, but A03 won't let me yet; I've used blockquoting for the past timeline, since there's enough italics in here already.

Will’s been in New York about a month when the courier pack arrives from Old City, dumped on his desk by Natalie, a bubbly twenty-maybe who stripes her Weasley red bob with brilliant bubblegum pink and screaming neon green. She’s wasted as an admin, and if he takes the job they want to give him, he’ll promote her to House network security yesterday; she’s as good with computers as Henry.

On his flatscreen, Zviya’s trying to convince him to come back to Tel Aviv, take the position there, make Aliyah and start his own House, build his own staff, and help the peace efforts by building satellites in the Heights, Beirut, Jerusalem instead. He tells her his mother was Catholic, and she tells him the Return is easier these days. It’s not really, but if he were building a Sanctuary in Zion, it probably would be.

“Come on, Will,” she’s saying in that indecipherably sexy accent of hers. “At least come back for a visit,” and she’s compelling, a bronze-skinned blonde South African Jew by way of Israel and Paraguay, an expert in rare biologicals and kicking ass, waiting for him very nearly naked in a bed they shared halfway around the world. “How long has it been?”

Since he talked to her? Two, maybe three days. They talk at least twice a week these days. Since they fucked? “Two months?” he suggests and she rolls her eyes.

“Shake the magic eight ball and try again, Will. More like four, going on five.” He can tell, she’s been talking to Kate again.

He tears off the strip on the courier pack, expecting it to be full of credit card receipts requiring documentation, a letter or two from Abby, asking if he’s ever coming back (it’s not his fault she can’t take no for an answer), data-sticks from Henry with the TV he’s missed while traveling, and his screamingly funny monthly missive from Kate on the never-ending saga on her search for a Stenophelhabillis mate, liberally spiced with her own ‘romantic’ misadventures in the triangle of Henry-Declan-Kate with an ongoing side of Erika. He’s still listening to Zvi, watching more precisely, since she’s about to frontload her argument with something persuasively risque, when it hits him--

 _Eyes opening in the infirmary to the brush of a single chestnut curl against his cheek and a lightly accented, “Ah, there you are. Welcome back to the land of the living, Will. How do you feel?”_

Safety. Well-being. Home. All carried on a familiar purple scent - purple for resurrection, passion, sensuality - sweetened with the playful innocence of rose, and sharpened, given backbone, by a metalworking of cool steel or chrome.

How long has it been?

One year, five months, and thirteen days.

\--”Are you even listening to me?” (No.) Zvi sounds impatient and no wonder, as she’s loosening the tie on her black silk robe.

“Something’s come up, Zvi. I’m going to have to call you back.” Her hair slips forward over her shoulder, her eyes soften, lips shaping what might be a plea, and for a breath, a heartbeat, he thinks he might answer. Then his fan catches that scent again, _her_ scent, and Will knows he never will.

 _I’m sorry, Zvi._

* * *

 _My dear, sweet Will--_

 _I hope this letter finds you well. You are in my thoughts often of late. You have been in my thoughts daily since you left, if I am honest, and I must be. You made me promise it, so long ago it seems, and with the exception of Adam, for reasons you know, I have always kept that promise._

 _It would be much easier now if I didn’t feel bound by it. If I might construct some excuse, some need, for which I might request your presence. You’ve made an impression on so many over the years. It ought to be simple to find some occasion of state with the Praxians - Ranna does always ask after you when we speak, or something to do with the U.N., perhaps, since Lilli still hasn’t forgiven me refusing her your number after the last visit. I might blame it on Henry who does miss you terribly or even Nikola who, would you believe, said Dane made him long for the days when my protégé had spirit, at least._

 _But you aren’t my protégé anymore, are you, and I mayn’t simply call you back to my side because I wish it, either. So I must ask, naked of excuse, like any other friend and wait upon your decision. I know you’re considering Tel Aviv and New York, and whichever you choose, you’ll do brilliantly; but I would ask you, please._

 _It’s been too long, Will. We all miss you, but me especially. The work isn’t the same without you. The Sanctuary isn’t the same without you. I fear I am not the same without you._

 _Come home to me before you choose?_

 _Please._

 _M._

* * *

How long has it been since he left for his Network tour? One year, five months, and thirteen days.

 _Come home to me. Please._

His bag is packed before the ink dries on his plane ticket.

* * *

Before the Sanctuary, Will never flew enough to get used to it. He’d ridden every bus, train, light rail, monorail or ferry, taken every cab in Old City and knew the birth city of more than half the cab drivers. Sometimes he rode the subway lines at night when he couldn’t sleep and made a game out of noticing what had changed since the last time he’d been through a particular tunnel. He’d solved more than a few cases with knowledge gleaned that way. Kavanaugh always hated it.

He’s flown so much the last four and a half years that he doesn’t even notice the hustle and bustle of other passengers when they’re preparing for take-off. There’s a lot of it, today, on the early flight from coast to coast. A woman with four kids, each of them noisier than the next takes the row in front of him, and a first-time flier with a heavy accent and even heavier B.O. is over two seats and behind. Will could upgrade to business class, but he won’t. As soon as the wheels roll up the tarmac, he’ll be in his own world anyway.

Besides, he always flies coach for the same reason he still wears printed t-shirts when he could afford French cuffs. The Sanctuary and Magnus have more money than gods, but Will isn’t one; he still feels faintly ridiculous sleeping on Egyptian cotton sheets and winces every time he picks up a tab for a business lunch. Yeah, Magnus is right that money is power and they need it to protect the Abnormals, but he’s right too. They need to be of the people, not above the people, if they’re trying to help, and a lot of Abnormals live poorer than most. It’s why they’d worked, he and Magnus. They balanced each other, evened each other out, took turns pointing out where to look and explaining what to see. At least, that’s what he’d thought...

When they came back from the dream-world they’d built together.

The engines purr and whirl. The steel thrums. The kids chatter and the already smelly guy farts out his nerves. Will drops away from them and remembers.

~* ~

  


> His heart beats hard and wild, frantic, while he tries to breathe and everything is wet. Instinct drives him upward and he breathes, but there’s no relief until he sees her, hears her. The others are there but don’t exist. For that first eternal instant when their eyes meet, there is only her. Helen Druitt, no, Magnus, Helen Magnus, his Magnus.
> 
> Will’s more than alive. He is safe. He is home. They are _right._
> 
> Other details sneak in then besides the endless blue of her eyes and the certainty he finds there. She’s wet again. They both are. It happens so often when they save each others’ lives (and they’ve saved each others’ lives so often, even the boy who breathed baseball statistics has stopped keeping count) that it feels like a cosmic joke. She hired him as her psychopomp more or less (and he has been, he’s killed her a few times by now too), but she taught him to see beyond and Will makes a practice of it. Kali called him ‘Durga’ and maybe he is. Slayer of demons, a deliverer, not stopped with eight midwifing arms up to his elbows, but plunged headfirst into the waters of rebirth.
> 
> Like the sub and the oil rig, they’re reborn together. Each time before, he’s felt them drawing closer. Each time, there have been truths. That he’ll succeed her, her psychopomp and replacement, _but not today_. That she can show a man a good time, and almost dying with her was _more fun than room service with Sigrid_.
> 
> This time, this time it’s different. They didn’t save each others’ lives, they saved each others’ souls.
> 
> This time, from that first shared breath, there is no turning back.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> When nothing happens at first, they go back to their lives, Will understands. It can never be as simple for her as it will always be for him. He is hers. She belongs to the world. At first, he is patient.
> 
> Days pass without so much as a look shared between them and patience wears thin. His heart has grown restless, itching and twitching and stretching under his too-tight skin, wings long to stretch and break out of yet another cocoon. From caterpillar to butterfly, another psychopomp, and she’s forcing them back into the womb - he’s tired of waiting for the metamorphosis of this rebirth.
> 
> Space to deal with the emotional complications, that much he can give her. They don’t talk about what happened, they don’t touch, they go to their own rooms and stay, even when dreams of the other world invade their sleep. They share a mission, a flight, meals, hundreds of words that say nothing. It’s like Ashley all over again, except that it’s not. They _talked_ about that.
> 
> Days pass and the ache grows so strong he forces himself to sleep, to remember the way it was in that suburban world that shouldn’t have been, to remember the moment they trusted each other to be right when everything was wrong.
> 
> Henry catches him watching the security footage of the tanks on his laptop and Will tells him there’s something they missed. He’s lying, Henry knows it, but he just nods and takes him out. They drink beer and gossip about Kate until she shows up and then they gossip about Declan.
> 
> Will’s a shrink. He knows what they’re doing. Circling wagons to protect him, while he gives her space. What’s amazing is that they know what they’re doing too. Usually when they drink, she’s with them in spirit. This time, in this bar she’d never set foot in, no one mentions her name.
> 
> It works for those few hours. Will feels more comfortable in his skin, even if who he’s become is less quiet than quiescent. He breathes, smiles when he goes up to her suite to wish her good night --
> 
> And freezes when he sees Tesla leaving.
> 
> He’s quick to recover himself, but Tesla must see something in his face, some hesitation, some weakness he can seize on. He strides forward, straightening his vest. Will always loathes the smug son of a bitch, but never more than this minute when he is so visibly fanning his peacock feathers.
> 
> “Well, Junior,” Tesla opens with lazy smirk that’s almost smarmy in its implications. “You’ve been a surprisingly...adequate...opponent, but I dare say the queen is in check. So be a good boy and--” He sharpens to points. “Run along now.”
> 
> Will doesn’t believe it. He won’t believe it. Not unless he hears it from her. Tesla’s only saying that because he’s threatened. Right?
> 
> Without a word, Will brushes past Tesla who just laughs and Will can smell the two hundred dollar a bottle wine on his breath. It makes him physically ill, and his stomach only knots up more when he sees her--
> 
> Navy silk draped over her, clinging to her curves, hair spilling over her shoulders in tousled curls, and her elegant fingers wrapped around a crystalline stem. “Will,” Magnus says warmly, pulling in her feet to make room for him.
> 
> “Is it true?” Will demands, harsh and short of breath. It’s probably not fair, but space ends where self-preservation begins. He can’t do this anymore. He loves her.
> 
> A frown puts a crease between her brows and he aches to kiss it away. Her voice cools but it’s not yet crisp. There’s still time for him to thaw her, if he will. “Is what true?”
> 
> He won’t. “You and him.” Will looks pointedly toward the door. “Are you sleeping with him?”
> 
> There’s a faint hesitation, clear Magnus sign of decision being made, before she pulls herself upright, full Victorian ice and basilisk stare. “I hardly think that’s any of your concern.”
> 
> She could’ve shot him in the balls and hit less hard. It takes a few beats for him to answer, and when he does, it’s done. “Of course. You’re right. How could who you sleep with have anything at all to do with me?” The words taste like ash and vinegar.
> 
> “Will,” she begins, getting to her feet, but her tone is unrepentant. She doesn’t plan to take it back.
> 
> “You don’t owe me an explanation.” Whether they’re having sex or not isn’t the point. The point is that they’ve been standing at the edge of the space between them for weeks and instead of reaching for him, she snapped the lines and walked away.
> 
> It’s the first time he’s ever deliberately lied to her, she knows it, and her eyes are so wide with regret and uncertainty, it’s like she’s the one who got slapped. “Have a good night, Magnus.”
> 
> ~*~
> 
> At meeting in the morning, Will stands as far from her as he can get. When he won’t sit, Kate gives him a nervous look, more than nervous, scared and a little bit wounded, like he’s betraying her somehow, and he knows he is, but not as badly as he’s about to.
> 
> “Stay behind, please, Will.” Normally, she wouldn’t have to move to get him to stay, or speak, just share a look for less than a breath. Today, she’s walked all the way across her office to block his exit. “I’d like to speak with you.”
> 
> Henry glances over her shoulder from the hallway, eyebrow up, and Kate’s just behind him, tugging him along. He’s not sure what that says about what’s on his face, but Will thinks maybe he doesn’t want to know.
> 
> Before Magnus can say anything, he tells her what he’s decided. “I’ve learned as much as I can here for now. If you want me to be your successor someday, I need to be on my own.”
> 
> She takes a step back, breath caught and teeth in her bottom lip. He’s hurt her, and it’s not that he _doesn’t_ care, he does. Everything in him wants to go to her, to hold her, to press his face into the curve of her throat and his fingers into the small of her back until the skin dimples under them and there’s nothing left but the warmth of her skin and the scent of her hair. It’s not that he doesn’t care. It’s that he _can’t_ , or he’s going to drown in everything he feels for her.
> 
> “Where...where do you want to go?” she asks and even with the world collapsing around her ears, he’s never seen her look so scared.
> 
>  _I’m not leaving_ you, he wants to tell her. _I’m leaving us._ But he says, “I was thinking I should visit all of the Sanctuaries. Your emissary--” That much he’ll give her, because this has _nothing_ to do with the job. “Like a European Grand Tour.”
> 
> He sees that last hit register, sees her realize what he’s telling her. If he’s the prodigy, the protégé, the favored son, then the completion of his studies should be marked by an extended tour, a debut. It would’ve been in her era, and she recognizes it. The only concession there is in the, “But it’s up to you.”
> 
>  _You have to decide whether I’m your lover or your heir,_ is the message, but whether or not last night was a mistake, she lets him go. So he guesses that choice is made.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Goodbye happens both impossibly fast and entirely too slow. He has almost nothing to pack and the arrangements are as simple as “I’m sending Will to you,” but the two days feel like dying, like dying the slowest death he can imagine, with no Durga, no deliverer, no rebirth waiting on the other side.
> 
> Henry promises him regular shipments of the TV he’ll be missing and visits whenever he can; it’s not effusive or emotional, and he never once tries to tell Will to stay. He knows why Will has to go, even without being told, and he’s a good enough friend - the best friend - to let him go.
> 
> The Big Guy doesn’t hit him at all, but nearly breaks his shoulder with the squeeze. “It’ll work out,” he says in that gruff voice of his. “You’ll see.” Will wants to believe he’s right, with all his heart he does, but he can’t. He can’t, or he’ll never heal. He needs a clean break.
> 
> When he runs into Tesla, Tesla doesn’t smirk or snark, but gives him an unreadable, “Good luck, Junior,” instead before burying his nose in a book. Will hopes he chokes to death on Magnus’s wine. If it wouldn’t hurt Magnus, Will would break the bottle and slice him to shreds himself. He’d heal, but Will and Magnus won’t.
> 
> Kate won’t talk to him at all from the minute she finds out, but an hour before he’s due to leave, she threatens to kill him if he gets hurt when she’s not there to save his ass. She promises to write, and there’s a long long long moment where he’s got no idea what she’s thinking, but she hugs him in a way that doesn’t seem like her at all. When her mouth is by his ear, she whispers, “I’ll take care of her,” then shoves him in the chest (out of his own room). “Now get out, before I cry or something and giving you mocking rights forever.”
> 
> Will doesn’t know whether to expect her or not. He doesn’t know what to want. That’s a lie, he tells himself, with his hand on the door of the limo taking him to the airport. He wants her to come and tell him it’s all a mistake and he should stay. But she won’t, and when he sees her standing there, it takes all of his willpower to lift the handle and open the door.
> 
> “Will,” she says softly, and suddenly she’s right there. She hugs him hard and whispers, “You’ll be brilliant,” and, while he fills his lungs with the scent of her, the tears on his lashes stick in the curls of her hair.

  


* * *

Smelly guy finally stops passing gas somewhere over Kansas, right about when the kids wake up from their naps. They jostle in their seats, shifting and trading them and grabbing for each others’ toys. Abruptly he misses Kate and Henry squabbling on the couch at morning meetings so much it hurts.

The flight attendant turns on the air over Smelly and flashes him a smile that practically has _Welcome to the Mile High Club_ written all over it. Will thanks her for the recirc, but he’s not looking at her face (pretty, angular, dark warm brown with cinnamon-red lipstick a different him, a different time, a different place would’ve wanted to lick off). Instead, he’s gotten caught up in the hidden, defiant streak of dark purple in her professionally straightened jet black hair.

What color is Kate’s now, he wonders. What has she done with the streaks? They mean things to her, and he’d just started figuring them out, the code, before he left a year, five months and fourteen days ago. Like white, white is always for her father, baseball, and red for her mother, though Will doesn’t know why. But red, not so confusingly and in a different shade, is also for the Sanctuary, blood red for the Sanctuary itself, fire engine lipstick red for Magnus. Sometimes Magnus is purple, though, and that Will understands only too well. She’s purple for him too, and for Kate, Will is always gold. Together, somehow, they are Easter, the resurrection, another rebirth. Not to Kate, probably, but it’s another one of those cosmic jokes to Will.

He told Kate the last time he saw her with Declan, when they were all way too drunk to be in one room, that he should be green or brown, something boring or bland, but she ignored him and pretended the colors meant nothing at all. When the groping started, Kate tugged at him to stay, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He went to bed alone, but in the last letter, Kate had told him to fuck off, he was still gold. There’s a message in that, too. She rejects his vision of himself and replaces her own. He wishes, sometimes, he knew what that was, because maybe Magnus likes him better.

Thinking of Kate and what she’d say if he asked (stubborn jackass nosy shrink with fucking terrible taste in clothes and serious luck with the hottest babes), Will smiles at the flight attendant when she asks where he’s headed, but it’s a sad smile, eyes soft and trending toward gray to match the Midwestern skies. “Home?” she asks when he doesn’t answer. “Someone waiting for you?” That only makes his smile sadder. He shrugs a little and notices the indentation from a ring on her left fourth finger. Divorced, recently, from the sharpness of the lines still. She’s glad to be out of the marriage, but tired already of being alone. “Maybe,” he tells her, rolling his head against the seatback. “I don’t really know.”

She ‘buys him a drink’ because she says he’s tense and he needs it. He takes the Beck’s without argument, because he’s afraid a massage in the bathroom might be the alternative.

~*~

  


> It makes sense when he leaves Old City that Magnus sends him to the UK first, to Declan. Declan’s head of his own house, but he’s also become part of their team. He’s tight with Magnus, got on well with James (sometimes Will wonders how well, but he’d only be envious, he thinks, even though he’s not into guys, so he never asks) so he “gets” Will when he’s up in his head and profiling or tracking mysteries or needing to know _everything_ , and he’s friends with both of them. A bridge, someone who will ease Will out of Old City and into his own.
> 
> Will’s glad, more glad than he can ever put words around that Declan comes to get him himself. Even when Declan’s first words are, “You look like hell, mate. What happened?” he still would rather it be Declan than some stranger, because ‘hell’ is underselling it. Will’s seen himself in the mirror and he looks like he did when the Makri had killed him and he just hadn’t died yet: scruffy, pale, and the only thing alive in him are his eyes, and those burn with that weirdly intense, fevered clarity that the dying sometimes have. He might be a psychopomp now, Hermes with a message for the Underworld, or the Lampades lighting the halls for Hecate (only Magnus is Hecate, and he’s not lighting the way for her since she’s not with him, except for the ways she is, she always is, and he’s trying to escape the ‘always will be’).
> 
> Declan asks and Will feels himself crumple like an imploding building. Henry and Kate and the Big Guy all knew. Even Tesla knew. But Declan doesn’t, and Will breaks down, no pride; it’s like Clara all over again, tears and clenched fists and locked jaw and all. He’d be embarrassed if there was enough of him left to feel anything but that ripping ache, the hole through his soul that is Magnus.
> 
> “Ah.” Declan claps a hand over Will’s shoulder, steers him into a car, and then out of the car again into a pub. He talks about his family - his Da, his Gran, his sisters (Clare, the solicitor; Fiona, the doctor; Bethia who’s brilliant at marketing and turned the local into a right tourist trap; and Moira, the artist who they all think is a bit daft but a gas anyway) - through the first two pints and Will listens, remembers, nods and doesn’t say much. Midway through the third, Declan says, “Magnus, yeah? How bad?” proving once again a gift for politics Will just doesn’t have.
> 
> Will shrugs and rubs a hand over his gritty eyes. “Professionally? Not at all. Right as rain. Personally?” His voice catches in his throat, and stays caught through his fingernail scraping an eternity symbol in the sticky accretion of years of spilled beer, maraschino cherry juice, Bailey’s and coffee among other things. “It’s... fucked.”
> 
> Declan’s eyebrows climb faster and higher than Sir Edmund Hillary, because Will _really_ doesn’t swear like that. Not about Magnus anyway. “Ah, shit, mate. You slept with her finally?”
> 
> Maybe he should be pissed that Declan zeroes in, but he can’t be. It just goes to prove what he already knows. What everyone knows. It _isn’t_ just him. Wasn’t. Besides, it’s a relief to be asked outright, so he can tell someone, “No,” and be sure it’ll get where it needs to go.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> The first month in the U.K. passes impossibly fast between retrievals, visits with Declan’s Gran and spectacular (even in college he’d never done better, worse? did the adjectives even matter at this point? not much else did) drunks, on one notable occasion combining all three.
> 
> Declan’s gone off to Old City and Will’s left with a hole in his nights where drinking with him usually goes. Will’s shrink enough to know the occasional ‘moment’ when they’re deep in the pints is transference and let it pass without acting on it. Declan’s been his Magnus-replacement, his Henry-replacement, his Kate-replacement, his Biggie-replacement, even on the odd day when he needs it, his Tesla-replacement. He’s become Will’s family as much, and in some ways more, than his team (and they are still his team, no matter what) has been, because he’s the only person Will will let himself close to. He’s the only one Will can trust; anyone else hurts too much.
> 
> But that’s why when Declan’s youngest sister calls, tears in her voice when she tells him about the fire in the barn next to her studio and the odd noises like wailing children, he ignores the warnings that Moira’s a bit daft and goes. It could be nothing, but if it’s a beansidhe or changelings or Fae and Declan’s sister investigates and gets hurt, he’ll never forgive himself.
> 
> He goes alone with a team in a van not far behind. From what he gathers, Declan’s been sparing with the details of his work with the sisters, so if Will doesn’t have to out him, he won’t. Besides, he really has no idea what constitutes ‘daft’ when you work for the Sanctuary Network (pretty much every conspiracy has its roots in truth, except maybe the aliens and the verdict is still so very much out on that) and he’d hate to scare the poor girl to death by showing up with an entire team of Men in Black.
> 
> Somehow Declan neglected to mention that his ‘daft’ little sister has a perfect oval face with high-arched dark eyebrows, sparkling green eyes, a cupid’s bow mouth, auburn curls so dark they’re almost black, and a penchant for painting in tiny skirts and midriff-baring t-shirts. She comes bounding out to meet him, a tiny sexual dynamo who somehow manages to look simultaneously like an angel of the silver screen.
> 
> “Are you Will? You are, aren’t you? I can tell, and I’m just going to kill Declan fer keeping you to himself. You’re coming to dinner next week on Sunday and that’s that,” she gets out and her arm is laced through his before he can even get a word in edgewise. He adores her instantly, and if he wasn’t heartsick over Magnus, Declan would be murdering him when he got home.
> 
> Will quirks a small smile at her, a little sad but a lot more quixotic. “Nice to meet you, too, Moira. Why don’t you show me where the sound’s coming from and I’ll check it out.”
> 
> The night sky’s barely lit with stars, and it looks bruised from the floodlights on her converted barn, or maybe that’s just projection. It’s the first time he’s so much as looked as a woman who isn’t Magnus in six months, and probably more like a year and a half, and, jesusgod, it _hurts_. Thank hell her curls are shorter on top and tumble in her eyes when she arches her eyebrows at him and those eyes that twinkle at him are green or his heart might break a little. More.
> 
> “And let you face a possible beansidhe looking like that, love?” Moira shakes her head and reaches up to touch his scruffy jaw (less neglect now than habit) and her smile softens, knowing. Will thinks maybe she’s not ‘daft‘ but ‘fey’. “Not happening, not a bit. Declan would just about murder me f’ I let something happen to his best mate. We’re going together or waiting for him.”
> 
> Will sighs. He should refuse and he could; he’s got a lot more steel than she suspects, but she’s Declan’s kin, solid as the day is long and just about as stubborn. If he leaves her outside, she’ll sneak her way in. “All right, but you stay behind me, yeah?”
> 
> Moira rolls her eyes, and he settles for ‘next to’. At least until they get in and he flips on a torch and immediately picks out the pawprints of a Finvarian firecat, then he’s shoving her behind him. Fortunately, the pawprints are big and he has a gun and she’s got the sense being a MacRae gave her, even if her breasts are pressed to his back and she’s peering around his shoulder instead of _leaving the burnt out hulk of the barn, Moira_.
> 
> The firecats aren’t dangerous when left alone, but Will’s suddenly clear on what happened: the female burst into flame when birthing her litter, setting fire to the barn. If she’s alive, she’s more dangerous than a Hungarian Horntail and twice as fast, since she’s literally made of flame when she shifts. It takes ten minutes for the sound to start up and it’s so mournful, his eyes (and hers) sheen with tears; he finds the kittens a half hour later in a hayloft hanging by a beam, cuddled up to the cooling ash of their dead mother’s form.
> 
> Tiny and still too young to burn, they’re safe to tuck into his jacket even if it means biting his own lips when they climb and nestle and knead. He tells Moira they’re just feral, but she gives him those eyes and that mischievous smile. They may not burn, but they glow, not to mention the gold with black markings wants to chew on his hair, and the rare flame-blue point shinnies down his leg every time he lets go of its scruff.
> 
> Moira pries it out of him over Guinness for him and milk and kippers for the kittens, and then smirks. “I won’t tell big brother if you don’t, Will,” she teases and he’s not sure who she’s reminding him of right now, but it stings like a motherfuck because he’s enjoying it.
> 
> He jerks his gaze away, but asks dutifully, “What’s it going to cost me?”
> 
> “Dinner next time I’m doing a show somewhere you are.” Smiling gently, she strokes her thumb inside his palm. “And maybe a kiss if you can ever do it without grieving for her.”
> 
> Not daft. Not daft at all. Jesus, he’s scared of what she could do with tea leaves or a crystal ball.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> The second month passes without a word about him moving on, whether from Magnus (he still has to see her for video meetings and emails now and again, but it’s always strictly professional) or from Declan who he’s pretty sure by now would be just as glad for Will to be permanently moving in. It’s actually that, how comfortable he is here with Declan and his team and, admittedly, with Declan’s family, especially Moira and Gran, that pokes Will along. He left Old City to detach, to become the old Will again, able to care without lasting connections, but instead, he’s becoming more like Magnus, more like Declan, with a Sanctuary Network of his own.
> 
> Gran’s the first to scold him that Sunday night at family dinner when he says, after bread is broken and grace spoken, he has to leave. She narrows her gaze at him and he gets the feeling she’s teeing him up like a golfball. Turns out, he’s both right and wrong when she pauses, puts her fork on the table and sighs. “Y’have to do no such thing, lad. You’re just afraid one of us is going to up and say it and then you’ll be stuck.”
> 
> Will wrinkles his brow but doesn’t ask. She’s as bad as Moira with those bright, bottle green eyes that see as much as his, and he’s afraid and sure that he knows exactly what she means. Instead he draws the knife across his mashed potatoes and watches the gravy well and spill. “No, I do. I’m needed in Nor--”
> 
> “Too late, lad,” she cuts him off with a stern look that might even sit Magnus down. “You’re family, and we love you. Don’t we, now?” Gran asks and the entire family from Declan’s Da on down to Moira choruses yeahs and ayes.
> 
> The look he gives Declan’s one part dirty and three parts betrayed when after the guy jerks his chin up in acceptable male acknowledgement, Declan mouths, “Love you, mate.”
> 
> “Bro code, dude. Bro. Code.” He can hear Henry cringing all the way ‘across the pond’ in his Batcave. And if he’s thinking in Brit-speak, Will knows he’s definitely stayed too long.
> 
> “Sorry about that, mate.” Declan laughs and claps him on the shoulder. “I should’ve warned you.”
> 
> Yeah. He really, really should have. “Sod off, _mate_ ,” Will mutters under his breath, and when Declan catches him in the great hall three days later to tell him, “You know you’ve always got a home here, no matter what happens with her,” he figures Declan knows Will meant in guy-speak, _yeah, man, love you too._
> 
> ~*~
> 
> It’s Moira, not Declan, who puts him on the plane at bustling Heathrow on Friday afternoon. She made a special trip in from the country and got up when she’d usually be going to bed. So he should take note of that, she teases, and asks him what he thinks it means.
> 
> He tells her it means her family’s right, she’s a bit daft, and she retorts that she’s a bit daft about him. It ties his tongue in knots until his bags have been put to the sidewalk and she’s standing in front of him, all five foot four of her, peering up at him with those fey, farseeing bottle-green eyes. “You’d have to be daft to be daft about me,” he tells her, trying for funny but it comes out sad. The hand that cups the back of her head is sad too and the kiss to her forehead he has to bend himself in half to give, but sadder still is the fact that once she gets her arms around him, he’s the one who can’t let go.
> 
> “Call, email, write. Any time, Will.” From sad to pathetic now, Moira sounds like a sponsor for a Program.
> 
> Will knows, there’s no twelve-step for getting over Helen Magnus. It’s more like a journey of a thousand steps, and his feet feel rooted in cement after only one.
> 
> “I will.”
> 
> “You won’t, but I will.” Moira gives him a leprechaun smile then pokes him in the ribs. She keeps poking ‘til he’s looking at her and swatting at her ( _now_ she reminds him of Kate) and back in the present.
> 
> “Thanks.”
> 
> Flippant and breezy, she blows a curl off her brow and shrugs her head off to one side. She should look like a rag doll but the effect is nearly irresistible. “Just call when you’re done trying to be alone.”
> 
> At first, he thinks she’s repeating herself, but by the time he realizes she means something much more profound, he’s staring out an airplane window, waiting on his private oblivion.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> It’s dark when he gets to Norway, even though the flight’s only two hours and five minutes from London to Oslo. There are technical difficulties, then weather, then finding a pilot who hasn’t drowned himself in vodka during the technical difficulties, so it’s late by the time they leave and Will’s had more than enough time to drown himself - in complimentary vodka (he quits the canned Guinness after the first one; if he has to feel like shit, he doesn’t have drink something that tastes like it when he’ll be back to visit in a month and a half, barring invasion from Hollow Earth or maybe Hollow Mars, and he can have it the way it’s supposed to be) and memories of Magnus. He wants to call Moira and tell her he’s not trying to be alone, he’s trying to live without _her_ and it’s not working.
> 
> So maybe it’s not so much that it’s dark when he gets to Norway, although it is, as it is that Will’s dark when he gets to Norway. Dark and broody and totally not fit for company. Even company like Soren and Megan and Nils and Tor. They’re great big cheerful people, all four of them, blonds with big hands and even bigger laughter. Soren knows Magnus from way back and all four of them like her fine, but they don’t know her well, don’t know, don’t ask, don’t care about her and Will, and, fortunately (considering how drunk he already is) have never met a problem that can’t be solved with more vodka. He discovers in a hurry that the five of them, including him, will have a _lot_ of problems. They never get close, but that suits him fine.
> 
> It means he works his days and drinks his nights and discovers he’s got an amazing tolerance for vodka when morning meetings start at noon. He also discovers Heimdall, the guardian of the Bifrost Bridge, a frost giant who hates Druitt as much as he does and Tesla even more. Will never asks why Heimdall hates Tesla, because he doesn’t have to; every time the giant mentions him by name, he twitches the right side of his cheek where there’s a scar twice the length of one of Tesla’s claws and almost exactly the same width.
> 
> Heimdall never asks why Will does, either, and that, Will reflects one night over paperwork and a bottle of Christiania, is probably a really good thing. Tesla’s not complicated - insecure genius megalomaniac whose worst fear is being unimportant, ignored, but covers it with arrogance; he orbits Magnus because she ignores the attitude out of affection. Will’s feelings about Tesla are complicated, mostly because he felt like they’d finally gotten somewhere when he went and...
> 
> Will pounds another shot of Christiania and gets himself good and bogged down in patient files and inventory reports.
> 
>  _”The Grozny Sanctuary’s been attacked by rebels, we’re being audited in Norway--” Will protests when the Big Guy dumps more of Magnus’s paperwork on him._
> 
>  _“Ugh, Norwegians.”_
> 
>  _Will blinks but doesn’t ask. When it comes to Biggie, he’s sure he doesn’t want to know. “And we can’t pay the electric bill in Asuncion because of the depressed_ guarani. _I don’t even know where Asuncion is.”_
> 
> When it occurs to him he knows more about Heimdall than Biggie and Heimdall still won’t tell him where the Bifrost Bridge actually leads, Will sighs, takes off his glasses and gives up the shot glass for a larger one. He seriously misses...
> 
> Sigh.
> 
> Will folds his arms over his desk and drops his head to them.
> 
>  _A soft knock at the door behind him pulls him out of a half-sleep. It’s Magnus and she looks better than bed and ten hours uninterrupted sleep; better than his current fondest pipe dream, in other words._
> 
>  _“May I come in?”_
> 
>  _Will lifts his head and smiles a bit. “Yeah, as long as you know the Norwegian term for capital cost allowance.”_
> 
>  _She says something he can’t even begin to pronounce, especially when he’s inexplicably thinking of her in braids and a milkmaid’s skirt, even though that’s Swedish. “Oh-h, show-off,” he quips to cover._
> 
>  _“Rough day?_
> 
> They all are, and it never stops being dark in Norway.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> When Soren mentions a Northern European summit in Reykjavik, Will can’t pass up the chance to go. They don’t need him at the meeting, and maybe if he tours the fjords he can go back and start from where it all went wrong. He even looks up Sigrid on googlechat, but she’s long since moved on, pissed off, no doubt, that he stopped answering her IMs.
> 
> It doesn’t matter. There will be plenty of vodka and fresh-faced women with names like Goodmansdottir, not that he’s actually planning on _servicing his libido_. The entire idea of ice sculptures in a cosmopolitan city with soaring spires and deep history sparks a tiny fire in him. Maybe there’s hope for his thousand-step program yet.
> 
> Within minutes of landing, hope’s dashed and Will wants back on a plane, back _home_. Reykjavik’s gorgeous and _everything_ reminds him of her. Maybe two years ago, he could’ve watched the sun rise over Hallgrimur without the explosion of pain in his chest. Maybe he could’ve stood on the fjords and breathed clean cold wind without remembering the crystalline moments between one death and the next rebirth.
> 
> Now, instead of swimming to frolic with Sigrid, he swims in the open air pools to drown his tears.
> 
>  _”Do not pretend that this is some giant intellectual loss. This is about your libido.”_
> 
> Steam rises off the water, graying out the world. Will’s not looking anyway. It doesn’t matter what or who surrounds the pool. All he’d see is her.
> 
>  _”Tuesday is Ashley’s birthday.”_
> 
>  _Her eyes are so impossibly sad. He can’t believe he was trying to leave her, leave what they do together for room service with some woman he barely knows. Even if she is the chair of Abnormal Psych at Stockholm University, she can’t hold a candle to what he has right here._
> 
>  _“That’s the real reason I wanted you to stay. I just... I didn’t know how to ask you.”_
> 
>  _Between one breath and the next, Will knows again the lesson he learned in a leaking sub below 3000 feet: he will do anything for her. He will do anything to save her. He will be hers. Always._
> 
> Will walks arched footbridges until he loses himself in the mist. He can’t decide which of them he hates more. Her for running from him again, or himself for deciding “always” ends where deliberate denial begins.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> “Moira?”
> 
> “Yes, Will.”
> 
> “It’s...oh. Hi.”
> 
> “Hello, love. You’re not okay, are you?”
> 
> “...really, no.”
> 
> “What’s wrong?”
> 
> “Everything.”

  


* * *

The plane empties out in Denver, but Will stays aboard. If he gets out in the Mile High city, in the wide open corridors of its circus-tent airport, he may run away without ever getting home.

Instead, he fires up his laptop. It’s habit now, even though he’s got no work to do. New York doesn’t know yet where he’s gone, just that he should be back soon, and Old City doesn’t know he’s coming. The only people who know where to find Will have stubborn British tempers and solid, unshakeable hearts.

His wifi connects, compliments of someone who really should know where to find Will, but they’ve been missing connections more and more lately. Henry’s still one of his closest friends, but they respect each other’s space more than Kate does. Fortunately, her favorite fuck-buddy’s Will’s other best mate and he’s conspired to keep her distracted with planning private reunions in places Will probably doesn’t want to know about.

There’s an email from him when Will opens the email Nat firewalled for him when he said he needed to be able to talk to Zviya without Henry listening in. Technically, Nat could hack it to know where he is, but she thinks he’s ‘too much of a Hufflepuff to be sneaky’. She might be right, but so far he’s hidden his return from Helen Magnus who makes it her life goal to know everything. Granted, that’s helped by him moving fast (something he learned from her, and annoyingly, from Druitt), but he’s pretty sure if Henry, the Big Guy, even Kate find out, his secret’s safe with them. They’ll understand; if he hasn’t told her, he has a reason.

Declan’s email’s short, to the point, and echoes Biggie’s words when he left one year, five months and fourteen days ago:

 _It’ll work out, mate. One way or the other, but my money’s on you._

 _I’m about eleven hours behind you. Hope I don’t see you for breakfast._

 _Declan_

Moira’s email’s even shorter, just a single line, but it’s neither dashed off nor thoughtless.

 _Breathe, Will. You’ll be all right. - M_

It’s good advice and he twists the nozzle on the air overhead, but before the canned-cool of airplane air can displace the stuffy warmth, he pulls out the letter from Magnus. Beneath his scanning fingertips, fine paper releases a burst of the unforgettable violet sensuality that haunts him. Will reads the letter one more time and inhales.

 _Come home to me before you choose?_

 _Please._

His lungs tremble with the promise of her, and Will thinks, somewhat wryly, that this is definitely not the ‘breathing’ Moira means.

~*~

  


> Will flies with Moira to Tokyo, not the other way around. She has a show later in the week and she drags him along, forcing him to take the vacation coming to him _somewhere other than that asylum you two run_. “Sanctuary,” he corrected her then, and now, as she sips chilled Cristal, feet curled under her - a petite green-eyed inquisitor ensconced in the middle of a yard of airline leather.
> 
> “Asylum,” Moira insists and also insists Will drink his champagne with a fast, shooing flick of her wrist. “Drink it. It won’t kill you. The bubbles might even cheer you up.” He’s been doing better since the night on the phone, but the nudge he gets in the thigh from one pedicured (and emerald-green painted) toe says not better enough. “It’s vacation.”
> 
> “For four days.”
> 
> “Until I go home,” she counters and he knows she’ll win.
> 
> Arguing with Moira is like arguing with Magnus. He goes into most battles knowing he’s lost and argues for the principle. This time, he concedes to spare the rest of the passengers the harangue. Still rolling his eyes at her, he catches the pokey foot in one long-fingered hand and draws it into his lap. Rubbing her ankle and calf gives him something to do with his hands. “Daft.”
> 
> “About you,” she retorts. It’s a shtick.
> 
> Normally he’d say something cute and quippy, but the ease and comfort of being with Moira kind of reminds him of being with Magnus. She’s not the center of his universe (and even though she hasn’t been functioning that way, Will can’t make himself say that Magnus isn’t) but they fit together and he doesn’t feel as hollow when she’s around. Maybe that’s why he finally says, “I wish she was.”
> 
> Moira pokes him with her toe again. “Big brother says the woman’s fair mad about you.”
> 
> Will makes a face and drowns the bitter venom of his thoughts in an entire glass of champagne. He’d worry about becoming an alcoholic if he didn’t respect his own mind too much. With a noncommittal grunt, he pours another glass for himself and tops off hers, glad, in this case, that she insisted on first class and that the collective doing her show paid for them both.
> 
> “Go on, then. Tell me about her.”
> 
> She knows the story of why Will left from the night in Reykjavik. He’d been so wrecked, so far beneath rock bottom, that there’d been no way off the floor of his cold Icelandic hotel room without tunneling through.
> 
> “You know what happened,” he says, looking past her to the window across the aisle. He knows that’s not what she means, and she’ll know he’s dodging almost as easily as he can spot a lie on a witness.
> 
> “Tell me about her,” Moira repeats and that catch-fire temper of hers simmers in bottle-green eyes. The dark curls she hasn’t bothered to tame almost tremble with her suppressed indignation that he’d put _her_ off.
> 
> That reminds him of Magnus too.
> 
> “What do you want to know?”
> 
> Moira smiles and crosses her arms over her chest, champagne glass against one elbow. Somehow she looks like both a modern-day enchantress and a kid waiting for story-time. “Why you love her.”
> 
> “Because she’s even more exasperating than you are.” In more than one really important way, that’s better than gospel truth.
> 
> “Will!”
> 
> His voice sounds like air-dried wet velvet, rough and spiky where it should be soft, smooth, when he answers, “How could I not?”
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Moira gets her kiss after the opening of her show. They’ve just left the sushi shop their Japanese host recommended, and the rain pelts down so hard, Will’s not even sure there aren’t literal cats and dogs. She wants to make a dash for it, so they do--
> 
> Across the street to another awning. They’re soaked to the bones, laughing their asses off on a combination of sake, sashimi and the best company. A single lock of hair plasters itself to Moira’s cheek in a perfect curl around her eye. It looks like something out of Sandman art, and Will traces the path of it with his finger.
> 
> Moira’s smiling; Will’s smiling. He slants his head and bends all the way down to pay the price of her long-since compromised secret-keeping. Trapped under an awning in the rain in a foreign country with a beautiful girl - it’s romantic, and the kiss is hot, sweet and tender...and deep down wrong like kissing his sister if he had one.
> 
> When rain from his hair drips in their eyes, they both laugh and pinky-swear promise never ever to do it again.
> 
> But the oppressive heaviness of his endless dark Norwegian winter breaks for a short gust of cherry blossom spring, and Will...
> 
> Breathes.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> He’s still breathing, only barely, when Declan arrives at the Tokyo Sanctuary, summoned by Will’s call for outside backup. This time, at least, it’s a panicked Abnormal who knocked the wind from Will’s lungs (later Will will concede that’s what happened last time, too) - a 2 a.m. feeding gone wrong, then very very very wrong.
> 
> The infirmary’s comfortable and Will’s fine, if bruised to hell and sporting several new hairline fractures of the ribs. They’re all still trying to piece together how the ganeshim got out and what spooked it so hard that the usually pacifistic bipedal pygmy elephant chance manipulator ran Will down without its chance manipulation ever kicking in. All of them except Will, who’d concluded over twenty-four hours ago before he got run down that they had to be looking at an inside job. It didn’t stop him from participating in the lively discussion and watching gestures, eyes, faces, mouths, patterns of interaction and looking at everything from fingernails to shadows.
> 
> As a precaution, Will declines a separate room for Declan, asking instead for a short screen to divide his and another futon. Fujisaki Shiori arranges it, and arranges for them to dine alone. Will thanks her for her helpfulness, but Declan’s Japanese is much better, and Shiori can’t take her eyes off him.
> 
> Will clicks his back teeth together and fights down a small explosion of bile as he slides into bed later that night. The part of him that still trembles with strain of carrying his grief so long, the same part of him that will never stop aching for Magnus and home, wants to ask Declan to bed with him. Not for sex; even if he were physically hale enough for it, except when he’s drunk off his ass, Will’s too straight for it to appeal, even with Declan (or Henry). But more than once Declan’s wrapped his arms around Will and held him together when he felt everything cracking apart.
> 
> Tonight, it’s not so bad, Will knows, or it wouldn’t be if his ribs didn’t hurt, if the physical pain didn’t mirror the emotional pain and leave him staring at the ceiling through the dark. The door slides open to his room and Will fumbles for the gun that should be beneath his pillow but somehow skitters away from his hand. The ganeshim? He’s about to turn on his lamp when he hears something to stop him - a girlish giggle and a masculine groan.
> 
> Tomorrow, he’s going to strangle Declan. Tonight, he’s just going to lie here and hope he and Shiori (at least he thinks it’s Shiori) finish soon. Lie here and try to think of Clara or Abby or even Kate instead of Magnus. Lie back and think of...the queen. Which doesn’t help at all. The sad thing is, this is better. It’s so much better than it was.
> 
> Will tries, honestly, not to listen, but there’s only so much he can not hear with only a half-screen between them. Shiori’s enthusiastic and Declan likes his pleasures. It doesn’t take a profiler to know what started out as a very messy blow job turns quickly into Shiori on her hands and knees, and Will didn’t need to know, he really didn’t, the sound Declan’s balls make when they slap against a woman’s ass.
> 
> He’s too annoyed to be aroused, and something else, there’s that bile again. It’s not jealousy over Shiori, or Declan for that matter, maybe it’s protectiveness toward--
> 
> “Ohgod, Katie.”
> 
>  _Katie?_ He calls Kate ‘Katie’ and he still has balls to slap against her--wait, hold on. _Katie?_ Will waits for the balk, the jealous screech and ringing slap but there’s nothing. Nothing other than Declan slamming into _someone’s_ sloppy wet cunt and that someone making a lot of what would be pretty noise under different circumstances.
> 
> He lays there, torn between letting Declan and Shiori finish (bro code, and also what if they agreed he’d call her Katie, or its her baptism name, or something and Will just doesn’t know about it?) and turning on his lamp and shoving the screen aside to see exactly who is in that futon with Declan. In the end, he waits, but pushes to his knees so he can get up when the woman (person? Abnormal?) leaves.
> 
> The screen door to the hall slides open and the silhouette’s briefly far more familiar than Shiori’s, but when Will hauls himself up and jogs after her to investigate, the woman in Declan’s bed is long gone.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> From Declan’s _What the fuck, mate?_ for Will following ‘Katie’ out of the room to his _Are you fucking serious, mate?_ for Will hauling him to the infirmary and telling him to drop trow so Will can examine him for any kind of contact transfer, injection, infection, infestation, and anything more generally classed in his mind as Abnormal ‘ick’, maybe twenty minutes have passed. Declan’s now sitting on the metal exam table back in his boxers, arms crossed smugly over his barrel chest, while he watches Will run test after test (himself, can’t trust anyone else right now; could trust her, of course, but can’t trust the network hasn’t been infiltrated and using her personal digits at this hour says things he’s been trying not to say for the better part of a year) that turn up nothing.
> 
> “Told you I was right as rain, mate,” Declan crows, maybe a little too much for Will’s fraying nerves.
> 
> “Yeah, well, considering you just banged some stranger at best, shapeshifter, projection, or God only knows what at worst, called it ‘Katie’, _and_ made me listen to it, you might want to rethink that,” Will snaps.
> 
> Declan gives him the eyes of British _I don’t give a fuck about your temper tantrums_ and says, “If you’re jealous, mate, we can just go back to bed and hunt this thing in the morning.”
> 
> Maybe it’s Declan, maybe it’s the situation, but Will shuts down the microscope, convinced this is Declan and Declan uncompromised, turns and crosses his arms over his chest. “It’s like you think I’m gonna take you up on it one of these days.”
> 
> “You might. I’m your best mate, I’m a hell of a pull, and you’re the sorriest sack of hard-up I think I’ve ever seen.”
> 
> It’s a strange conversation to be having at any time, surreal as hell, but somehow it’s as okay as Will’s felt since leaving...yeah, home. Being here with Declan means he can honestly think of Old City as home without suffocating or drowning.
> 
> “Pulling with you--” Declan’s words, Declan’s accent, Will’s blue eyes and quirk of a smile. “Would be weirder than pulling with Moira.” He drops the accent and continues, “I appreciate it, Declan, more than you know, but--” _I’m not ready_ wars with _I don’t want anyone but her_ , and the fact that _I’m not ready_ is even in there at all is a measure of how much better he really is.
> 
> Declan gets down off the examining table and pats Will on the shoulder. “We’ve got a dangerous Abnormal to catch, yeah?”
> 
> “Yeah,” Will answers, grateful to be let off the hook, grateful that Declan’s Declan, grateful that Declan’s _here_ , because whatever this thing is and Will’s starting to get a few ideas, he doesn’t want to be retrieving it alone. Declan at his side means he won’t wish (as much) for Magnus.
> 
> “So we get whereabouts and check security footage--”
> 
> “In case whatever it is or whoever isn’t thinking to erase a video trail--”
> 
> “But they probably are--”
> 
> “Plus if they can hide in plain sight--”
> 
> The rest of the conversation is nods interspersed by the odd word or three while Declan dresses, until Will grabs a pad of paper to write on.
> 
>  _Inside job. Y/Y?_ he writes, while hiding the pad from the security cameras by leaning over the exam table with his legs pushed out behind.
> 
> Declan circles both Ys when Will gives him the pad and pen. He draws a neat line under Will’s question, separating solutions from new questions. It’s a very military mindset, Will thinks, and it’s one of the things he likes about working with Declan. Orderly and predictable without being boring and humorless. He’s reliable, like Will.
> 
>  _We both saw. Felt real. Projection or shapeshifter?_ Declan writes in ugly, blocky print.
> 
> Lips pressed together, thoughtful, Will stretches his legs out, runner-style, then taps one ankle over the other heel. “Hard to say,” he says out loud, then writes, _Assume both,_ even while he’s continuing, “It let the ganeshim out or made me do it and forget it. It had sex with you or made us both think you did. But we can’t rule out possibility of contamination of effect by my contact with Charms.” Lucky. Lucky Charms. It’s what they call the ganeshim because they’re not anywhere near as funny as they think they are, and Tesla’s not the only person in the Sanctuary Network who sucks at naming things. Actually, it’s kind of a trope. Another time, Will might devote thought-space to why they’re no good at it.
> 
> Now, Will hmmms out loud both for what’s written and what’s said, then writes, _Suspects?_ and his list includes two: _Charms. Shiori._ He draws a sharp, dark arrow toward Shiori’s name and Declan nods.
> 
> Will writes _Flirt with her_ and says, “We’re going to need some help. You ask Shiori.”
> 
> “You work here,” Declan plays along.
> 
> “Yeah, but she’s totally into you, man.”
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Was. She _was_ totally into him.
> 
> The way Shiori’s giving Declan the cold shoulder today almost has Will rethinking it. He tries to smile and call her gorgeous, Declan does, and Shiori glares daggers at him. The concealed kind, like chopsticks for hair, hidden beneath cool, traditional politeness and a porcelain doll face. It’s how he’d expect her to act if Declan _had_ called her Kate - _Katie_ , man he is so never living that down - by accident. Especially when she starts being super-extra-nice sticky mocchi sweet to Will instead, to the point where he has to turn down some ancient family remedy tea she wants to make for his ribs, just in case it’s got a hallucinogen in it.
> 
> At mid-day meeting, Declan passes Will a note, and he’s half expecting it to say:
> 
>  _Do you like me? Yes/No._
> 
> Because it’s just been that kind of day. It doesn’t though. It reads:
> 
>  _Plan B. You flirt. I know you suck at it but it’s for the cause._
> 
> Will writes him a note back that has seven letters on it, and he folds it into a paper football and flicks it at Declan’s temple just because he can. Declan flicks it back five minutes later with the _off_ scratched out and he’s written _Wanna_ at the beginning instead.
> 
> “Ha ha,” Will says when they finally break, and then adds, “I’m hoping I’ll be busy tonight,” loud enough for Shiori to hear. He glances back and sees her watching, then goes for the champion _oops, caught me_ with a little smile and shrug. She grins and winks and Will figures it’s a shoo-in.
> 
> Declan murmurs low by his ear as they head into the Abnormal residences, “Careful, mate. She fancies you. I was just a target of opportunity.”
> 
> They’re together the rest of the afternoon, but Shiori’s the one passing the food trays and meds cups and there’s no time to discuss it. Even though he has questions about the experience Declan had, things he’d like to know to prepare, Will’s kind of glad (scratch the ‘kind of’) he doesn’t get the chance. He both knows and is avoiding knowing that a repeat performance of last night will be a wolf in an entirely different sheep’s clothing.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> When he gets into bed that night, his ribs hurt less, but Will hurts more. The bed seems harder, the ceiling lower, and he’s sure the walls are closing in. Declan’s just the other side of the screen; Will can hear his quick-to-sleep shallow breathing, but unlike the walls, he seems light-years away, separated from Will by a yawning chasm.
> 
> The door slides open, just like last night, and Will closes his eyes to shut her out. He knows, he knows, he _knows_ , and still there’s nothing he can do to change what’s coming.
> 
> “Will?” It’s her voice, soft in the dark, and softly accented, thrilling and intimate, the way he’s only heard it in dreams.
> 
> His chest tears open and the sky is falling in.
> 
> “Yeah?” he answers, instead of ‘I’m here’ the way he would if it were her. Because it’s not, it’s not, it’s _not_ , even though when he opens his eyes, the silhouette in the doorway is perfect down to the last, shoulder-brushing curl.
> 
> “I didn’t want to be alone. Do you mind if I come in?”
> 
>  _Magnus._
> 
> Will chokes back a sob, chokes on a sob, just chokes but reaches for the pulse weapon under his pillow, anyway. It’s not there, which he should’ve predicted considering last night, but the pattern his brain is stuck on has nothing to do with weapons. “Of course not.”
> 
> She comes to him and kneels beside the bed, but Will can’t look, he can’t turn his head. His shoulders feel so stiff that if he moves, he will break. If he sees her, even though it’s _not_ her, every bit of resolve he’s taught himself by being away will crumble, blow away on a cherry blossom wind, gone for good.
> 
> The hand that strokes his chest and catches his jaw is _not_ hers, but it feels like hers, a century and a half soft where it should be callused, long fingers knowing. The movements are hers, down to the pressure applied to turn him to face her.
> 
> Just a little bit longer, just a little bit longer and Declan will realize the situation and they’ll have her caught in her own net, he tells himself. Just a little bit longer, and he thanks every god in creation this wolf isn’t wearing Magnus’s scent.
> 
> “May I?” she asks, oddly diffident, but his brain tells him that’s accurate too, she would be, about coming to his bed like this.
> 
> “Yeah.” He lifts the covers and bites the inside of his cheek. _Declan, come_ on _mate._ Please.
> 
> The lamp goes on the other side of the screen and casts a shadow against the sheet, the shadow of a fox with seven tails. Will wraps an arm around a waist that feels painfully familiar and holds tight.
> 
> “Declan.” The sound is torn from his chest. Expected. But the answering, “I can’t, mate. It’s her,” almost as raw just isn’t. Isn’t expected, isn’t prepared for, isn’t acceptable, isn’t even close to something he can deal with.
> 
> “It’s. Not. Her.”
> 
> Declan may be confused on that point, but Will’s not. The woman struggling against his grip could be a perfect imitation in every detail, no tails, the scent of her skin under the sensual purple, the scent of her hair, and Will would still know. The unnaturally observant, the legends say.
> 
> The pure of heart.
> 
> “You’re sure?”
> 
> She’s changing, slipping, sliding...but the Abnormal is still trying to tell Will’s mind she’s _her_. “Declan. Just. Shoot her.”
> 
> Time seems to have slowed down, frozen. Seconds, maybe a minute, maybe two since she crawled into his bed, but when the energy discharge hits her and he lets go, it feels like forever. She slumps onto him, seven tails, jet black hair and no curls.
> 
> “Shiori,” Declan pronounces.
> 
> “ _Nogitsune_ ,” Will manages then shoves her so hard she rolls off the bed. He doesn’t even make it to the door before he retches.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Eighteen hours, three interrogations and a field trip later, the _nogitsune_ has rejoined her den with an exchange of promises. She will not meddle with the Sanctuary again if they promise not to develop her land. The bulldozers are stopped and rerouted, that afternoon, and the very ancient golden-eyed _nogitsune_ (seven tails, when the maximum is nine and they are accrued with hundreds of years) trots off toward the horizon of the brand new Fujisaki Shiori Nature Preserve.
> 
> Blank, Will crouches and stares after her into the blood-streaked tangerine of the setting sun. His fingers drag through the rechristened dirt, over and over, not digging for China, gold or even Irish gold, just dredging it up, churning it up, like the memories he can’t seem to shut off.
> 
> When Declan finds him an hour later, there’s black under his nails, streaks on his cheeks, and - he only sees it because Declan’s so quick to smudge it with his foot - an infinity symbol drawn deep in the dirt.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> The Cat and Cask is as deep in Tokyo as Will’s symbol in the dirt, a tiny bar in a British-style residence in the residential area owned by a slightly less tiny ex-pat named Wayne. Of course, he’s one of Declan’s mates. He might be an abnormal, part dwarf, but Will’s too deep in himself to care.
> 
> What matters is that the beer’s neither too warm nor too cold and poured British style, down the side with a short head, and the tabletop where he sits, leans, stares has nothing sticky for him to scratch a lemniscate into and he’s not the type to shred himself to/decorate himself with infinite scarlet ribbons (he doesn’t speak Norwegian but he’s not drunk at all; his etymological Latin’s just fine). It’s probably too bright, but Will’s resurgent Norwegian winter’s dark enough he hardly notices.
> 
> It’s always bad when he gets recursive, Will knows. It means his mind’s skating patterns - loops, _lemniscates_ \- of avoidance. Not denial, no, he’s way past that, pints and pints past it, enough that even Declan’s a bit bombed keeping up.
> 
> Will knows he is, bombed, that is, because he kisses Will on the forehead and says, “You’re an ass, mate. You should go home.”
> 
> “Can’t,” Will rubs the sloppy mess of beer and spit off his forehead (why are all of his friends cheerful drunks; all his friends except _her_?).
> 
> “Y’mean ‘won’t’.”
> 
> “That too,” Will agrees and downs half a pint while the room whirls and the light trails look like...hah, ribbons. He can’t remember the last time he was this drunk. Declan was probably involved. Or the Norwegians. But he’s drunk, so he...recursively can’t remember.
> 
> “Don’t get it, mate. You’re out of your head about her. Why stay away and torture yourself?” It sounds sane, like good advice that Will should want to follow.
> 
> He doesn’t.
> 
> Will hooks both hands over the back neck and pulls down like he can stop the loops, stop himself, by putting down roots in the table. “No, you don’t. Get it. I _can’t_.”
> 
> “She misses you.”
> 
> “Low blow.” Will looks up, bleary-eyed, and laughs, a hoarse, hollow, cheerless sound, sadder than a sob. “I miss her too.”
> 
> “Then _go_.”
> 
> Will shakes his head, and he’s too drunk to regret it even (shaking his head; he regrets not going home all the time, but that’s not a reason to do it). “No. N. O. No.”
> 
> “Explain it to me,” Declan says and twirls his finger to order another round. Will almost sees the glowing blue at the end of it. Almost sees the symbol. “Explain it, and I’ll lay off.”
> 
> “Infinity.” In Will’s mind it makes perfect sense. From the look on Declan’s face, though, he’s probably going to have to explain that. “Lemniscate. Moebius. Unending."
> 
> “M’not drunk enough for you to get off by changing the subject.”
> 
> They both laugh because it’s so not funny, getting off with a changed subject - a fox in sheep’s clothing, and Will’s eyes leak with the days’ third round of tears. Declan sighs. “See, that’s what I mean.”
> 
> “It’s what I mean, too.”
> 
> His friend leans back, arms crossed over his chest, and the chair seems to list, but Declan’s in no danger of toppling, unlike Will. “Do better.”
> 
> “I can’t face ‘never’.” _It’s all for nothing, if I can’t face never._
> 
> “Jesus.” Declan puts down his beer and his chair legs. “I’m sorry, mate.”
> 
> Will shrugs. In a moment of perfect clarity, extended from epiphany, he lifts an eyebrow and quirks his lips. “Does she know it means ‘I love you’?”
> 
> “...what now?”
> 
> He’s getting off by changing the subject, sort of. “‘Katie.’”

  


* * *

As far as Will knows, Declan still hasn’t told Kate, and Will can’t blame him. Nothing spooks Kate (Katie) faster than being loved. It’s irresistible to her, moth to flame, and she’ll keep coming back for it, sampling it, warming herself on it, but if you call her out on it, she’ll bolt.

She and Magnus are alike that way.

Folded into an exit-row seat on a soon-to-depart flight from Denver to Old City, Will puts pen to paper to try writing her a letter. It’s not instead of or before or after, he sort of just wants to see what he’ll say if he lets everything tumble out of his head.

 _Magnus,_ he begins for the fourth time, and for the fourth time immediately scratches it out for being dishonest. _My dear, sweet Will._

They’re wheels-up, plane rumbling down the runway. Will writes, _Helen,_ as his eyes slip closed.

 _They’re alone in her office, standing near the door. Henry and Kate have been fobbed off with twin fake it ‘til you make it _we’re fine_ s. Somehow her hand has ended up in his again. It’s been happening whenever they’re alone since they left St. Pierre’s lab in New Mexico. _

_Will doesn’t ask if she’s all right, because she’s not and he doesn’t want her to have to lie. It’s the same reason she’s not asking him._

 _“Thank you, Will,” she finally manages, but her voice sounds wrong, like Helen Druitt’s, and her eyes are haunted._

 _“For what?” he presses, because there’s something important here, something that has her showing him the face he met in the dream, the one he glimpsed for the barest instant a lifetime ago on top of the Sanctuary, looking out over Old City the very first time._

 _She struggles for words but she seems to want to give them, so he doesn’t let her off the hook with_ it’s okay, you don’t have to explain _. “Believing my work meant_ something.”

 _His thumb rubs over the back of her hand, but he’s not sure what to say. For him, that’s axiomatic. Four plus four equals eight; it’s_   
_her. In any world, he’d know that. But maybe that’s what she means._

 _“I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Now she’s watching him, studying him, waiting to see whether he’ll pick up the tense change._

 _He’s a profiler. Of course he does. What it means, though, that’s something else besides. “You’d figure something out.” He gives her a soft, cheeky grin, testing a little, pushing a little, mostly stalling for time. “You’re Magnus. It’s what you do.”_

 _“Helen.”_

 _Time just ran out. Will blinks, confused. “Huh? I mean, I know that’s your name but...”_

 _“You stopped being Dr. Zimmerman a long time ago.”_

Will snaps awake, present, at the sound of the ‘food trolley’ (her words) rolling up the aisle. He glances at the pad he’d been writing on, expecting to see the chicken-scratch of the ‘written in my sleep’ variety or just the slide-marks of the pen. There aren’t any, but there are a ton of sideways figure eights. Infinity symbols.

Lemniscates.

“Are you a mathematician?” The kid in the seat next to him has huge round glasses, huge round eyes, a hint of a lisp between split front teeth. He looks like ‘yes’ would be the coolest answer ever.

Will almost doesn’t have the heart to disappoint him, but this trip is about honesty and lying seems like a bad omen. “No.”

“Oh.” Yeah, he sits back in his seat, skinny arms crossed over his chest in disappointment. After a minute, he gets it into his head to ask another question and jack-in-the-boxes forward and over. “What’s it for then? There are sure a lot of them.”

Since he didn’t draw them consciously, at first Will doesn’t have an answer. And then he does and it’s true and right and aches like a soul bruise. “I’m trying to remember what it means.”

“Oh,” says the kid again and he’s tempted to be disappointed, but then he remembers he can help, at least that’s how Will interprets that bright grin. “I know. It’s not an eight because it’s sideways. It’s an infinity. It means forever.”

“Unending,” Will agrees.

 _I just can’t deal with ‘never’._

~*~

  


> When Will videoconferences with Declan from Tokyo about his new assignment in Asuncion, it’s to bitch about the _guarani_. Not because the currency’s any more depressed than it had been or because Magnus hadn’t gotten the electric bill straightened out, but because the brightly colored bills are literally the only thing Will knows about Paraguay and he has finally gotten used to yen. Declan tells him he’ll like Paraguay, especially the rare biologicals expert, Zviya Ben Gurion.
> 
> He neglects to mention that Zviya has legs up to the proverbial, smoldering golden-brown eyes and long honey blonde hair to go with the sultry accent and the even sexier brain, all of which Will thinks is decidedly unfair. Especially since he’s looking for a small, roundish, big-busted New York Jew with that name and he spends the first half hour of the ride from the airport tripping over his tongue when he’s not plain picking up his jaw.
> 
> Okay, yeah, it isn’t that bad. He’s worked with a lot of incredibly beautiful women in the last four years (Magnus), but his devotion to one (Magnus) has mostly shielded him from being a complete dork around the others. Somehow the setback in Tokyo actually pitched him forward and he might, finally, be in a place where _liking Zviya_ could mean something other than _not pining for Magnus_ when he’s with her. The end result is, Will’s a complete dork (he’s already done Connery, Willis, and Eastwood in _Unforgiven_ ), which Zviya seems to think is outrageously funny and because she’s teasing and he’s blushing, neither of them notices they’re being tailed until she’s driving through the Chacarita telling him not to come here alone.
> 
> “Shit,” she says in her indecipherably sensual accent, and Will’s about to ask why she swears in English since most non-native speakers don’t until he remembers she’s at least part Israeli and Hebrew still borrows most of its curses.
> 
> “Any idea why we’re being tailed?” he asks instead. Anyway, it’s a more useful question, even if her answer’s, “No.” Will’s watching their pursuit out the side window, but in the dark he can’t see much more than “car”. The right front headlight’s busted, looks to him like shot out at close range with a small caliber pistol, and if he squints, he’s almost sure there’s only one “person” in the car. “Person” because the head’s anything but human-shaped and Will’s completely under-educated about the Abnormals of South America. It’s a failing on his part, but he’s never quite forgiven the continent for being the birthplace of not one but three Abnormal species that have tried to take him over. He regrets that now.
> 
> Apparently, they teach stunt driving to Israeli army officers (Mossad, probably, but she refuses to confirm or deny it; Will thinks she’s only doing it to be funny, since he’s seen NCIS and none of Ziva’s contacts ever deny being Mossad), because Zviya zips through the Chacarita by the riverfront like Bullitt on the streets of San Francisco. Unfortunately, whoever’s chasing them has attended the same driving school and the only things they’re likely to lose at this speed are the wheels, the transmission, control of the vehicle or the lives of passersby (there are an alarming number of prostitutes on the streets at this hour).
> 
> Zviya doesn’t seem remotely bothered by the prospects, any of them. If anything, it looks like she’s having fun. Will’s hanging on for dear life and wondering if Declan’s assessment that he’d _like Zviya_ was meant to be tongue in cheek or a projection, since at the moment, the only thing he likes about her is her competence, all right, and the fact that her fierce concentration reminds him of “Katie” (still never living that down).
> 
> “Get ready to run,” she says abruptly without slowing the car in the slightest and Will blurts out, “Are you insane? Did they bring me here to treat you?”
> 
> She grins at him and slams on the brakes. The tires squeal and throw up a shower of whatever the local road-rock is; the car slides, fishtails then spins to a stop outside a barbed wire fenced compound that’s palisaded inside the barbed wire. “Home, sweet home,” Zviya purrs then shoves him out his door.
> 
> Will thinks she’s a maniac, but she’s not a stupid maniac, and he runs. Too bad their pursuer (definitely not human, the head looks vaguely boar-shaped) has enhanced speed and agility. It bounds _over_ Will and Zviya (who in addition to the legs up to her armpits is almost six feet tall) and puts itself between them and the gate that doesn’t seem to be opening anyway.
> 
> “Okay, now we try this my way,” Will tells her. He holds out both hands to show they’re empty and starts talking. Standard Sanctuary spiel - not here to hurt you, mean you and your kind no harm, if someone’s told you otherwise we’ll help you, blah blah pacifying rhetoric mostly designed to give Will time to observe the creature for giveaway behaviors.
> 
> He’s vaguely aware of Zviya doing something, using him as a shield, but his focus remains where it has to. The creature’s not moving and it appears to be listening, but a single break in Will’s concentration will kill them both. _Everything_ about this creature’s behavior scans as hostile and only the fact Will’s still talking keeps it in place.
> 
> It cocks its head, tilts it up and makes a sound, “Ao Ao Ao,” that sounds both angry and vaguely wounded. Will tries the latter, “Are you hurt? Do you need our help?”
> 
> “That’s cute,” Zviya says from behind him, and he’s about to be really seriously pissed off, but the thing takes that instant to make the sound again, then leap and he discovers what Zviya’s been doing: loading her drop weapon with tranq pellets. She shoots it in what he hopes is the dangling belly and not the testicles (it’s the testicles, he learns later, and they’re enormous, no wonder it’s known for fertility) and, seriously, he could be watching the Matrix for the way it falls out of the sky at his feet.
> 
> “I had that.” Will gives her a weak smile, and he’s reminded, abruptly, of Magnus shooting the Morrigan down his first month on the job. For the first time in months, thinking of Magnus doesn’t hurt. Much. Just a small stab in the heart, but Zviya nudges him with her knee, tells him “You did well, Will. No one has ever tried to _talk_ to an Ao Ao before, and because of it, I was able to save us. Perhaps when it wakes, you will be able to try again,” and the stab fades along with his annoyance at Zviya.
> 
> He still hates South America, but he’s willing to concede there’s a lot to learn.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> When he’s settled in and the Ao Ao comes around, Will does take another shot at it, and another, and another, and another. The Paraguayan team thinks he’s batshit for it, and maybe he is, maybe it’s just a point of pride, but he can’t stop thinking about Jack the Pleskie or maybe Kali. All ugly on the outside, all scared and hurt on the inside, not really wanting to hurt anyone but needing someone else to make the link for them. Needing someone else to try.
> 
> He ignores the sense of deja vu, the barely there awareness that his stubbornness might just be rooted in figure eights of flame blue and someone he desperately needed to trust him and keeps on talking to the creature. Somewhere around the seventh day (Will has no idea, he can’t remember if he’s slept, when he ate, who he’s spoken to; he’s more obsessed with the Ao Ao than he was with Adam, he thinks) the Ao Ao starts talking. It, he, Will reminds himself, speaks perfect English, barely accented with Guarani, which trust him, is weird coming out of a boar’s head.
> 
> The Ao Ao, Maato, he names himself, tells Will of his life before as a protector of the mountains and hills, a peaceful member of a peaceful tribe, all of them content to live apart from humans as long as humans abide by the agreements. The old ways. Now, humans come and take plants and soil and samples (Zviya’s biologicals, Will’s beginning to understand) and the Ao Ao must stop them.
> 
> “Why,” Will asks, “Don’t you just explain?” Zviya’s ancestors lived by rules, locations measured in paces, arcs built to exacting specifications, rules of kashrut. She, at least, would be willing to abide by the old ways (or with Will’s help make new ones).
> 
> “I cannot.” Maato’s head hangs so low, Will’s loathe to respond, “But you just did,” though it’s the only sensible thing to say. He reminds himself that signs of grief or distress in humans may not be matched with similar emotions in Ao Ao. That Abnormals must not be supposed to think like humans, even the ones who speak like humans. Yet his voice still sounds tentative when he finally says it anyway.
> 
> “I explained to _you_ , Will. But I cannot explain to her.”
> 
> Will frowns and rakes a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. Is it because she’s a woman?”
> 
> Maato grunts, a very porcine sound, and then laughs a rough, “No. It’s because she’s a lawbreaker.”
> 
> Alllllll right, then, this is going to be a problem. Will may need to call in an anthropologist, or consult with one. For now, he gets the information he can. “And it’s your job to punish her, so you can’t speak to her?”
> 
> “No, Will. I literally cannot. If I catch her scent, I must chase her until I catch her and kill her or mate her and take an Ao Ao of her bearing back to my tribe. There is,” Maato says and Will thinks he sounds sad about it. “No other way.”
> 
> Oh _hell_ no. And he thought Zviya being a lawbreaker was a problem. “You understand I can’t let you do either of those things?” Technically he _could_ , if Zviya wanted to consent to the mating, but he’s extremely reluctant to ask. So reluctant his ‘can’t’ is almost as literal as Maato’s.
> 
> “I do. But what can I do? You will have to keep me in this cell forever to keep me from pursuing her.”
> 
> That’s when Will realizes it’s not tradition that’s at the root of things but biology. Probably. Okay, yeah, he’s a little slow on the uptake. Magnus probably would’ve caught it at “scent” and maybe so would Zviya, but if Zviya were sitting where he is, she’d be dead or pinned under a boar-man with _testicles_ the size of Will’s head.
> 
> He rubs the back of his neck and considers. “What happens if you can’t smell her?”
> 
> “Then I can continue as I wish, until I catch her scent again.” Maato sounds only vaguely encouraged, and Will shifts in his seat to catch his gaze. “I did try to lose her scent, but she returned earlier in the day that I chased you to a village nearby and...the rest you know.”
> 
> “So, either we have to keep Zviya away from you, make you not able to smell her, change her scent somehow, or erase your memory of having ever smelled her scent before?” Will is not thinking of violets, rose and chrome, he isn’t, but fuck if he’s not all kinds of _right there_ with Maato.
> 
> “I do think that would work, Will. I don’t wish to harm Zviya, although I wish she had aimed her dart elsewhere. That still hurts.”
> 
> Will gives him a wry but sympathetic smile. “Believe me, man. I know.”
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Johan (Paraguay’s Sanctuary team makes Old City look like Amish country for diversity) wants him to hypnotize Maato and make him forget Zviya’s scent. Leaving aside the problem that even the strongest post-hypnotic suggestion isn’t impenetrable, it flat out doesn’t work. Will knew it wouldn’t; scent’s the most powerful memory trigger. But Johan wouldn’t listen. Ao Ao aren’t human, after all, Will. No, but they have a biological imperative coded to scent, Johan.
> 
> Will stops being annoyed about day twelve (two days of sleep and three of trying) when Johan figures out how to change Zviya’s scent. It’s surprisingly easy, considering. A small matter of changing her hormonal and chemical balances tested repeatedly with Maato unable to see or hear anyone walking by but the air from Zviya’s passage pumped into his cell. It takes about five tries to get it down, and Zviya’s going to have to take the pills or get injections the rest of her life (even if she’s halfway across the world, because if for some reason Maato travels to where she is and the artificial scent is fading into the natural one, they’ll be right back at square one, or at least square ‘new chemical cocktail’), but it beats the alternative and fortunately doesn’t screw up her pheromones when it comes to humans.
> 
> Will knows, because he’s not even a little less attracted to her when she invites him out to celebrate. He’s not _more_ attracted to her either, and with everything he’s been exposed to and Shiori not that far from his mind, that’s a good thing too. He thinks they’re going for drinks, but she takes him to a steakhouse and Will promptly discovers Argentina’s not the only place in South America where you can get great beef.
> 
> Okay, he thinks an hour and a half into it and three glasses of something so strong it’s almost toxic later, when she admits to being an Abnormal (the subspecies the myths of the dybbuk are based on), maybe South America is growing on him. It’s not...it’s not something he can explain easily, why Zviya being an Abnormal changes everything. Will’s not even sure he understands himself. Maybe it’s because the idea of what she is, a being who records memories on crystals is cool to him, or maybe it’s because she’s suddenly less Sports Illustrated Swimsuit and more Sanctuary Network, but after that night he stops working so hard to shut her out, even if he doesn’t exactly let her in.
> 
> Not for lack of trying on her part. She’s been open about her interest - both sexual and intellectual - since he woke up after the breakthrough with Maato. Nothing uncomfortably aggressive like grabbing at his ass or cornering him, even though she’s probably got that in her if she’s given enough encouragement. Instead it’s the quiet things, the way she makes a point of meeting his gaze when he’s talking to her or in a briefing, the lingering touch of her fingers against his when she takes papers from him, the invitations to join her no matter what she’s doing that are always delivered to _him_ and not the collective, the way she’ll take every opportunity to sit at the edge of his desk to talk to him and not just to talk to him but to ask about him.
> 
> After four years of indecipherable signals and stolen glances and touches that aren’t supposed to mean anything at all even when they mean everything, it’s kind of (scratch the kind of) a relief to be able to relax into _knowing_ even if he’s not sure what he thinks/feels/wants yet. The novelty of it hasn’t even started to wear off yet the night he swings by her room after a really rough retrieval to make sure she’s all right. His interest hasn’t gelled into anything like _I want to tap that_ , but his protective instincts have kicked in and, as Declan pointed out when they talked about it last night, that’s almost always the first step for him.
> 
> Zviya calls for him to come in, and counter to cliche, she’s not wearing next to nothing. She’s wearing what Kate calls a maxi dress, cream blending through several shades to a dark olive green, that covers everything but her arms and she’s got on some kind of lightweight cardigan-thing that he doesn’t know the name for that covers those. Not the type to hide her body, even in her own room, the clothes signal Will she’s not all right at all, and he’s perversely more uncomfortable about being in here than he would be if she wore boy shorts and a tank.
> 
> He scans her face and sees not just the shadow beneath her eye from where she got hit, but the shadows in her eyes for all the bruises he can’t see. “I...just thought I should stop in and see if you...needed to talk or anything,” he explains, but hovers near the door.
> 
> Her hand slides through the spill of honey-blonde hair, pushing it back behind her ear as she lifts her head to meet his gaze. “Are you here as a therapist or a friend?”
> 
> Will takes a deep breath, because ‘friend’ isn’t really what she’s asking, even if it is. He blows it out and answers, “Whichever you need.” There’s a stab of guilt there to go with it, like he’s betraying _her_ , but she’s the one who shoved him away, maybe slept with Tesla instead of him. Tired of it, Will shoves the whole thing roughly aside and stands there, naked-gazed and willing to try but awkward. “I mean that, Zvi.”
> 
> He’s not quite sure what happens, or at least not until later when it’s explained to him, but Zvi puts down her book, swings her feet over to the side of the bed and gets up, and at the same time, Will’s fingers brush against something crystalline on her dresser. The next thing he knows, he’s flying across the room with the mother of all migraines, seriously head splitting open.
> 
> Something hard with a jutting corner collides with his hipbone, abruptly stopping his flight, and then it all “fades” to black.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Will wakes to the scent of violets and he doesn’t open his eyes. She’s not there or she’d call him on it, but he’s in a hospital bed, everything hurts, he’s scared, and right now, he’s just going to pretend. It’s not hurting anyone that he lets himself believe that the hand that strokes his cheek is hers, or that he pretends the tears are from the pain. He sleeps again without ever opening his eyes and dreams of home.
> 
> When he comes to the second time, he feels a little better equipped to deal with Asuncion and the golden-brown eyes peering worriedly into his own. He can almost imagine they’re blue, almost imagine the posh British _ah, there you are, Will_ in the seconds before she speaks and says, “I’m so sorry, Will. I shouldn’t have had them out like that.”
> 
> It’s not as jarring as it should be, or maybe it’s more jarring than it should be and he’s too numb to know. Either way, he rolls his tongue in his mouth - it’s cotton-fluffed - and croaks, “Water?” and then after he’s had some, “How long?”
> 
> “Three days,” Zvi tells him and he freaks the fuck out - wiggling his fingers, his toes, everything he can feel. “Will!” Zvi rests her hand on his chest, then slides it up to stroke his cheek. It was her, he realizes, and he breathes. “Stop. You’re all right. You’re fine.”
> 
> It takes a few more minutes and a visit from Johan to calm him enough to ask, “What happened?”
> 
> Johan slides a look at Zvi and Zvi buries her face in her hands and starts to cry.
> 
> “Hey,” Will says quietly and pushes himself upright. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did and he pats the space beside him. “Hey, Zvi, come on. I’m okay, right, so whatever happened, it’s fine.”
> 
> She comes to sit at the edge of the bed and somehow he ends up comforting her, but that’s okay. It’s more familiar, less stressful. The only people he takes comfort from are a continent or an ocean away.
> 
> “The crystals. They shouldn’t have reacted that way. But something... we don’t know what. Your experiences with Kali and the Praxians, maybe...” She shakes her head. “No one’s ever...” A sigh, a shrug. “You touched a tray of memory crystals and they overloaded you. If there’d been another half-dozen in the tray, you would be dead.”
> 
> Death by memory.
> 
> It would’ve been a fitting way for him to go.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> When they give him his laptop, there’s an email from Magnus and Will abandons the guards on his heart to hope.
> 
>  _Will:_
> 
>  _I’ve looked over your charts. You can expect to have odd memory flashes that are not your own, perhaps for the rest of your life, but there’s no lasting neurological damage. If anything you may find your cognitive processes sharper than ever._
> 
>  _Magnus_
> 
> ~*~
> 
> The next night, he sleeps with Zviya.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> “It’s casual,” Will tells Declan when they talk a week later. “Nothing serious. Just a fling between coworkers.” Even though they’ve fucked their way across Asuncion. He hasn’t had sex in almost a year, since Abby, and Zvi is almost always ready to go. The only time she said no, they were covered in annelid slime and he was kidding. Mostly.
> 
> “But I was right. You like her, mate.” Declan sounds roundly satisfied and, while he is right, Will does like Zvi and Zvi more than likes him, Will can’t help poking holes.
> 
> “Yeah, but not like you like ‘Katie’,” he sing-songs, half-drunk on sex, wine and the promise of a hot, willing woman in the next room.
> 
> “Give it time.”
> 
> Will shakes his head. “Nah. Not even like Henry likes Ka--shit, sorry, mate.” He forgets, sometimes that what’s completely obvious in his head (Kate needs to be with Henry to be with Declan, or else it’s too serious, means too much, she could get hurt too badly, at least for now) doesn’t translate to A-OK with Declan.
> 
> “It’s fine, Will. Kate--” Resolutely not ‘Katie’, Will notes again. “Is who she is.”
> 
> “Give her time,” Will returns, but it’s not embroidering on a theme. At least, he doesn’t think it is. He and Zvi are just having fun, blowing off steam and burning off stress. Aren’t they?
> 
> When he hangs up with Declan, he fucks Zvi up the shower wall, her legs around his hips, hands gripping the pipe overhead, and screaming. Will dips his head and bites the pointy peak of her nipple, she clenches around him and comes again. He grips her hips and tugs her down while he slams up in, a few more thrusts and she’s absolutely wrecked. After that, he slows it down and enjoys the ride. They’re both exhausted by the time he lets her down.
> 
> After an uneventful day of harvesting her plants, he pins her in the botanical gardens up against the exterior Sanctuary wall. Crushed against the brick, she laughs and laughs when his fingers slip inside unzipped jeans, but she’s slick and hot already and he’s merciless with how he plays her, never letting up on the hard knot of her clit until she shatters and has to bite her own forearm to quiet her moans.
> 
> She gets him back later in the evening, shoving him into a statuary niche after the late meeting and, without even a kiss for warning, dropping to her knees. He’s never been more thankful to be a skinny guy who wears loose jeans when she fishes his dick out and lollipop licks him hard. He fists that honey blonde hair, tilts his head back against the wall, and whispers, “Fuck, Zvi.” Her mouth is knowing and wet and she draws it out and out and out until his eyes are rattling in his head.
> 
> She wears a skirt when they go into a neighboring town to help with vaccines. It’s completely mundane, but right and good, and they hike up her skirt and screw like teenagers (or Peace Corps volunteers) in the back of the car before they drive home. For a week, they camp in the mountains collecting her plants and the canyon echoes with her cries and his groans.
> 
> By the time the invitation comes, they’ve probably worked their way through half the Kama Sutra, most of the Sanctuary and for the rest, it’s just a matter of time. His face is slick with her pleasure and she’s sheened with sweat and panting when she picks up the phone. He bats her hand away, “Seriously, Zvi? Right now?”
> 
> “Israeli Defense ringtone,” she explains. He sighs and licks the inside of her thigh.
> 
> Her hand tangles in his hair, grip tightening as she listens. It’s enough to get his attention and he stops (temporarily) screwing around. His thumb strokes a soothing circle at the inside of her knee, and another, and another, head pillowed on her thigh while she dots and dashes her way through bursts of excited Hebrew, a sort of non S.O.S. verbal Morse code, but he doesn’t know what any of it means.
> 
> When she hangs up, she smirks and shoves his head between her thighs and he willingly sucks her swollen clit and works her with his fingers to finish where they’d left off.
> 
> “They want me to come back to Tel Aviv. It’s about a Sanctuary,” she finally tells him and he wouldn’t need the experience of her ‘O’ sounds to know she’s thrilled.
> 
> It’s a casual fling between coworkers, not even as serious as Henry and Kate, so he grins when nips her belly and says, “And of course you’re going to go.”
> 
> “Will you come?” she asks, and that shocks the hell out of him.
> 
> It shocks him even more when he shrugs his way through a smile, slides up her body and into her and doesn’t say no.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> “I should get my own place,” Will says from the kitchen floor of her Tel Aviv apartment. They had ice cream and a blow job and he’s propped up against the cupboard with his hand still stroking her hair while he contemplates more ice cream. It’s hot and they can definitely afford the calories.
> 
> “Why? You’ve already been here three weeks. You’re never going to use it,” Zvi protests.
> 
> Once again, he acquiesces. It’s less the path of least resistance than the path of most orgasms. For the first time he can think of, sex is plentiful, he really cares about his partner and it’s not screwing up his life. “Have I told you lately you’re very smart?”
> 
> “Yup.” She snares the ice cream carton and drags it toward her. “Yesterday when we had this conversation.”
> 
> “Right. Remind me if I try to have it again tomorrow.”
> 
> ~*~
> 
> As it turns out, she doesn’t have to. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, he’s on a fast flight to Rome with barely enough time to pack a bag and promise he’ll see her soon. There’s a string of murders with no connection between the victims beyond the rake marks, gore and signature - each is clutching an Etruscan coin.
> 
> By noon the next day, Will’s sure he’s dealing with a minotaur, maybe the minotaur, but as far as he knows there’s no labyrinth in modern Rome (his ability to get lost on a one-way street doesn’t count) and he, unfortunately, lacks Ariadne’s red thread.
> 
> It’s a week before he finds the note in the bags Zvi sent from Tel Aviv for him -
> 
>  _Stay safe. I love you, Will._
> 
> And a week and a half, six more murders, and a wake-up call in crimson, black and bone before he has a chance to video-call.
> 
> “What is it with you and human subspecies with animal heads?” she asks and means _are you coming back?_.
> 
> “This one had animal legs, too,” he answers and means, _sorry, Zvi, not yet._
> 
> “Had?” Her voice is soft and her golden brown eyes are even softer.
> 
> “Dead,” Will confirms and he just sounds tired. “I had to shoot it.”
> 
> “It was murdering innocent people. You had no other choice. You did the right thing, Will.”
> 
> She’s sharp on the uptake, smart about Magnus, in love with him; Will doesn't love her yet and she knows it, but he’s pretty sure there’s nothing delusional about thinking maybe someday he could.

  


* * *

There’s no one at the airport to greet him when he arrives, no Sanctuary car waiting to take him...to his destination. It’s been one year, five months, and fourteen days, probably half the cab drivers he knew in the city have moved on.

It could be fourteen years, five months, and one day and Will would still feel it in his bones. No sooner has he walked off the jetway than he knows it. Old City. Her home. For a minute, he closes his eyes, inhales and imagines he smells her on the recycled airport breeze.

For a minute and a heartbeat he imagines _he_ is going home.

But there is still no one in the oddly sterile airport concourses there to see him. The few faces that seem familiar could be from crime scenes, McDonald’s on the run, retrievals or lies he told to cover them.

If he wanted, one call would have a car here, Big Guy waiting in it or cooking at home, there would be dinner and drinks, a party, but Will wants no fatted calves to welcome him. Instead, he comes like wily Odysseus in secret to spy upon his wife, to see if she has taken a lover in his absence (or kept the vampire she had), to see if she entrusted a new father with their son.

Before he can abuse the metaphor any farther, Will shakes his head and lifts his hand to hail a cab. Since he has only one bag, the driver leans across the battered leather seat to let him in.

When Will ducks his head, two small dark eyes light with a champion’s grin. “William! Where have you been, my friend?” Before he can answer, Ishmael goes on, “Never mind that, where are you going? Home?”

“Good to see you, Ishmael.” Will smiles at the shapeshifting Abnormal, one of the first he’d ever met, but he doesn’t nod or agree. “Take me to the Sanctuary.” And when Ishmael reaches for his phone, Will stops his hand. “Please. Don’t.”

~*~

  


> Valentina, the head of the Roman House, asks him to stay for awhile after the minotaur case; she needs a people person, someone less jaded and more accessible to her team which is almost all new, most of the old having been lost last year when an escaped water elemental flooded Ostia, a port city of ancient Rome. Will’s missed doing _his_ job, missed being useful for more than his observation skills and gift for communicating with Abnormals, missed being “less jaded”, missed being a protégé (missed being _hers_ ) so he does.
> 
> Valentina’s House is a historic villa arranged around a square tiled courtyard with a fountain of Neptune and four dolphins in the center. Younger by far than Magnus, she is still an old friend of hers and enough older than Will that he feels the difference. She loves old things, rich with history and rife with meaning, strong ties to the mythic and magical, and when she asks him, one balmy night over the third glass of Tuscan red, what he thinks of her fountain, he thinks of submarines, oil rigs, lab tanks (birth canals, midwifing, deliverance) - rebirth. His mind stutters, stumbles on buried metaphors and buried dreams. They hurt less now, but they’re still definitive; if Will is Rome, they are the Colosseum.
> 
> When he answers Valentina, the only word he has is, “Psychopomp.”
> 
> She laughs in that big, broad way that Italian women have, drains her glass, and soaks up the rest of the oil and balsamic with the heel of a loaf of freshly baked Italian bread. “Not mine, young William. I live in the shadow of the Vatican.”
> 
> Not hers.
> 
> Will may have stepped out of the shadow, if Zvi counts as living in the sun, but the shadow still, and will always, lay dark upon the ground.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> It’s not a long trip to the Vatican, geographically speaking, but the mythic distance is a vast one. When they arrive, they’ve already spoken of Aeneas’s voyage, Boccacio’s ten days, and Dante’s archaeology of the soul. She mentions Campbell as they step from Italian soil to that of the Holy See, but Will is thinking of Conrad. He makes a pithy comment about the humidity approaching that of the Congo, and Valentina praises him; he’s half-afraid the journey home will include an invitation for a late night viewing in her suite of Fellini’s Satyricon.
> 
> Literary history is swept aside when she detours from their mission to the Secret Archives for a private visit to the Basilica. The brilliant colors (lime, watermelon, tangerine) of Michelangelo’s masterpiece are not as he remembers them from Art History 101. Valentina laughs when he mentions it and tells him, “Il Maestro was not so dour as they like to make him,” and for a minute, a breath, Will’s tempted to ask if she knew him.
> 
> Instead, he contains his awe to Sibyls and Prophets, the Creation and Last Judgment. He stands, for a long time, under the hands of God and Adam, thinking both of the spark of life and the gap between them, of primordial seas and single-celled organisms, very incongruously of Ralph Williams’ Honors English - Dante-poet and Dante-pilgrim, and less so of Will the profiler and Will the protege, Will the prodigal but not the son.
> 
> “Come along, William,” she eventually says. “The Holy Fathers are waiting.”
> 
> “No they’re not,” Will retorts, but he rolls his head on his shoulders, unkinking his neck like Michelangelo come down from the scaffolding. “You didn’t call ahead.”
> 
> “Touche.” She grins and her eyes sparkle, cheek showing a dimple that’s hauntingly familiar, even though hers has a symmetrically placed twin. “Still, the Archives are waiting and so is the Dybbukian reading them.”
> 
> Will’s eyebrow lifts with so much force it takes the corner of his mouth with it. “Zviya’s here? You didn’t mention that.”
> 
> Once again, Valentina’s expression goes from open to appraising. “Not Zviya Ben Gurion, no, but one of her kin. Sanctuaries must have long memories, William.”
> 
> And just like that, he has stepped back into the violet and tea rose shade of a Gothic cathedral. Which memories, he wonders, were in the crystalline archive that altered him?
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Will has his first memory flash four days later when he’s going through his email. He clicks on a message from Henry that’s marked “Urgent, dude, I mean it.” Before he can smile at the new twist on Henry’s email labeling system, or observe that it was pretty effective, his eyes are scanning the text for content.
> 
>  _Will, dude, I’m seriously freaking out here. Everything’s all screwed up. Big Guy and I are here alone, and I don’t know what to do. You know how we sent you the briefing on that undercover mission? Well, they left for the South China Sea a week and a half ago and now Kate and Magnus--_
> 
> Pain slices through him, cleaving his brain from the space behind his eyes, seriously, angel with a sword of fire time, here. He grabs for the desk, panting, and he thinks he’s doing pretty damned well not to hurl with the way everything is pain and screaming and walls-and-eyeballs melting.
> 
>  _A tall woman with dark hair, pale skin and arresting blue eyes gazes across a desk. She’s imposing, strong, but the shadows beneath her eyes say she hasn’t been sleeping and the bones of her wrists seem sharp. There is something about her that’s unnerving._
> 
>  _“You’ve been briefed, I assume? It’s been explained, how we use what you can do?” the woman asks, in polished British tones._
> 
>  _“Yes, doctor.”_
> 
>  _“And you want to be a part of what we do here?” she asks, and there’s a peculiar insistence to it, as though any hesitation will see her packing._
> 
>  _“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”_
> 
>  _That eases the woman and she smiles. If she were honestly happy, she’d be heart-stoppingly beautiful. “Welcome to the Sanctuary Network, then, Zviya Ben Gurion.”_
> 
> Will reels out of the flash and manages to get his head over his trash before he loses it. He wishes he could blame it on the pain, which is gone, instead of how _wrong_ Magnus looked with hair dyed to Valentina’s dark walnut and ironed pin-straight instead of her own rich chestnut softened with gentle waves if not unruly curls, down to skin and bones like she’d been dinner for a vampire instead of her toned but feminine curves. The worst was her eyes, haunting and haunted, looking back at him but seeing someone else. Zviya.
> 
> How long ago was this?
> 
> He racks his brain for a timeline and recalls Zviya met Magnus not long after he left Old City. It would explain why he hasn’t noticed, unless Henry’s been tossing up an image filter for video-conferences. No, they would’ve told him if she’d stayed thin like that. Big Guy would never have let her go long without eating, but he can’t help wondering about the hair. It was red after Druitt, chestnut after Watson. Just exactly who is the walnut for?
> 
>  _Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. I say it tolls for thee._
> 
> He’s probably misremembering the quote, and he’s not sure he wants to get it right, considering.
> 
>  _Jesus, Magnus._
> 
> Will rinses out his mouth with a swig off a bottle of San Pellegrino. He hated the fizzy water before Rome, but it’s growing on him. Best for cleaning puke from your mouth isn’t exactly positive advertising, but it happens to be the truth. Too bad there’s no equivalent for hearts and brains.
> 
> He pours a glass and makes himself rehydrate while he reads the rest of the email from Henry, but the upshot’s right there in the sentence he’d been reading before the flash. Magnus and Kate are missing and Henry’s running the Sanctuary alone.
> 
> Paging down through his email, he finds a matching message from Declan. A little less panic, a little more fact - Declan’s on his way to China with a tac team. He’ll be on the ground in - Will checks his watch - four hours and he’ll update from there. A little less panic, a little more fact, but Will’s learned Declan well enough to read between the lines; Kate’s missing along with Magnus and Declan’s anything but zen about it.
> 
> Will pings Henry by IRC.
> 
>  _Will! Thank god. I’m serious, man, I’m losing it._
> 
>  _ _Where the hell is Dane?_ Will’s message demands and Henry knows him well enough to hear the sharp, all business tone from the lack of greeting._
> 
>  _AWOL, dude. Six weeks ago. You didn’t know?_
> 
> Obviously he doesn’t or he wouldn’t be asking, and Will skips right over that, no time to examine how he feels about it now (about how once he would’ve known _everything_ that affected her and when it counts he doesn’t even know her replacement for him is gone). Right now, he needs to evaluate whether or not Dane could be responsible for Magnus and Kate being off the grid in Asia. _What happened? Keep it short._
> 
>  _Got Kafka-ed._ Metamorphosis-ed, changed into an Abnormal. It happens to everyone at least once, and usually more like once every six months. _Took it bad and flaked out. Magnus still hopes he’ll come back, but he won’t. He’s a lightweight._
> 
> Will rubs his eyes under the glasses he went back to when constant climate change and worse-than-ever insomnia made contacts hard. _Was he pissed? Say anything about ‘getting back at’ anyone?_
> 
>  _Dane? Hell, no. Guy’s a cream-puff. It’ll rain frogs before he hurts someone._
> 
> Sighing, Will types back, _It rained frogs in Brazil two years ago. Remember?_
> 
>  _Whatever, dude, bad example. Point stands. I’m sure. Dane’s not the problem._
> 
> Normally, Will wouldn’t accept someone else’s assessment, but it’s Henry, and while Henry’s not the most people-smart guy sometimes, he loves Kate and Magnus and if he thought for a heartbeat Dane could have anything to do with it, he’d tell Will.
> 
>  _All right._ Will frowns and rubs at his eyes again. He’s already tired. _Stay close to your computer. I may have more questions._
> 
> There’s a longish pause and Will interrogates it for possible meanings, but when Henry’s message window pops up, he realizes he didn’t need to. He knew. _[smile] Will, man, you don’t know how glad I am to hear that._
> 
> Will signs off with a, _Hang in there, H. We’ll get them back._ He’s not sure how much he feels like ‘we’ at the moment, but Henry needs to hear it.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> By the time Will finds Valentina - actually, she finds him and kindly doesn’t ask about the stench from his wastebasket - ‘not sure how much’ has become ‘we, damn it’. This is his team, these are his people, no matter how long he’s been gone. They’re his family and his responsibility and, “I’m sorry, Valentina. I have to go.”
> 
> Valentina nods knowingly and curls her manicured hand around his stiff-to-the-point-of-trembling shoulder. “ _Certo,_ Will. The plane’s in Oslo, but I have ordered it back already. It will refuel as soon as it lands. Where will you go?”
> 
> Will _wants_ to go to China. He wants to be on the ground where Magnus and Kate were last seen, comb where they’d been staying for every clue, do what he’s best at. He wants to be there they are.
> 
> “Old City,” he says instead, because he’s needed there and the best thing he can do for everyone (Magnus) right now is keep things running (the homefires burning) smoothly. Declan will contact him if he needs him, or he loses whatever lead he’s working from. But if he loses the lead, it will probably be too late, and up to Magnus and Kate to save themselves; four days off the grid, realistically, it is already.
> 
> “She’ll be fine, Will,” Valentina tells him and he blinks at her, uncomprehending. “Helen. She’ll be fine and she’ll see Kate safe too.”
> 
> “I...” Now’s not the time to ask if everyone in the entire universe knows or it’s just splashed across his forehead in Vegas neon because she’s in danger. Damn it. He’d thought...but it doesn’t matter, does it? Magnus is in trouble. Magnus needs him. He may be trying to live without her, but that doesn’t mean he’ll risk her life or her life’s work for the sake of his heart. “Yeah,” he answers. “I know.”
> 
> The hell of it is, he does. He knows. She’ll be fine and so will Kate. But it changes nothing. Will can’t not go.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Will’s packed and waiting at the airstrip for the plane to refuel the minute it touches down. Impatient, pacing, heart twisting in his chest, he pulls out his phone to text Henry.
> 
>  _Be there in less than twelve. Hold down the fort._
> 
> Less than thirty seconds later, his message icon blinks.
> 
>  _Big Guy’s already airing out your room and shopping for you._
> 
> As fucked as this all is, Will still can’t help but smile at that. It’s not like he doesn’t miss them (every damned day).
> 
>  _Of course he is. Tell him it’s blueberry *pop tarts* and strawberry *pie*._ It’s a long-running joke with no beginning, no middle, no shaggy dog, no end. Just something that happened over time, like them being friends.
> 
>  _Hey, man! Check your email!_
> 
> It’s a non sequitur, but so’s Henry. Like a walking, talking, breathing non sequitur. Will forgives him, because there’s a sixteen-seconds-new message from Declan.
> 
>  _Guys:_
> 
>  _Found them. Wet, cold, bruised, hungry but not much worse for wear. Full details when I get them into a hotel and fed._
> 
>  _Declan_
> 
> Will squeezes his eyes shut and breathes until his phone interrupts his devotions (there’ll be candles for St. Anthony tomorrow; when in Rome...).
> 
>  _Still need the pop tarts, man?_ Henry’s second text asks, and Will can hear him hoping, and maybe lighting the HAP equivalent of devotional candles or laying a breadcrumb trail.
> 
> Will wants to say yes, but if his own reactions prove anything, it’s that the answer’s still no. His feelings for her still swallow him whole.
> 
>  _Not unless she’s going to be out of commission awhile._
> 
> Magnus isn’t, and Will doesn’t go.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> He doesn’t go, but later that night, he’s pacing the edges of the courtyard beneath the arched portico. 436, 437, 438, 439. He counts the tiles under his feet as he passes, but not like sheep for sleep, more like calming breaths.
> 
> He’s angry, he’s hurt (he was scared), he’s spent hours aching from a metaphorical kneeing where it counts when he thought he’d finally healed. Hold your breath for ten and exhale failed of its essential purpose before Declan’s briefing email.
> 
> 451, 452, 453, 454.
> 
> Oh for fuck’s sake. It’s not like the shell-scroll border terra cotta tiles are giving up any answers or any analgesics. He’s not torn stem to stern, ripped raw and bleeding, but more than a year and a pretty terrific girlfriend later, it still...
> 
> Just. Plain. Hurts.
> 
> Will crosses out from under the portico to drop at the edge of the fountain. The moon leaches him and the tiles of color, but there’s more than enough light to type into his phone by.
> 
>  _Kate,_
> 
>  _Got the official debrief and heard from both your boyfriends, but I won’t sleep until I hear from you. Tell me you’re okay. Mock me if you want. It sounded pretty gruesome, and I’m worried about you._
> 
>  _Will_
> 
> Before he can rethink it, Will hits send and it’s done, the thing he’s been resisting for one year, four months and seventeen days: admitting that he’s never stopped caring. Not for a second. All his lengthy silences have been the worst kind of lie.
> 
> It’s not like Kate doesn’t know, or they haven’t spoken. She’s just been uncharacteristically close-mouthed about calling him on it.
> 
> He resumes pacing, picking up the count where he left off: 486, 487, 488... He’s up to 713 when his phone alerts him he has new email.
> 
>  _Will -_
> 
>  _You’re an asshole. Seriously. I can’t even believe... oh fuck it, yeah, actually I can. And I get it, I do, but you’re still an asshole._
> 
>  _Major dick move, emailing *me* because you’ve gone all zombie-insomniac over her._
> 
>  _Yeah, I *know* you care about me, so don’t bother getting all high-horsey or shrinky about it. I’m *fine*. Broke my pinky and the knuckle of my right hand. Cracked a rib or two, but Doc says it’ll all heal right._
> 
>  _I’m not too busted up over any of it. I mean, it sucked, don’t get me wrong. No one wants to live like cattle in the cargo hold of a ship where someone’s puking every six minutes, believe me. Manacles, it turns out, are a lot harder to pick than handcuffs, but I managed, and Magnus has some pretty surprising skills with chains, that’s all I’m saying._
> 
>  _She’s fine, too. More or less. You know how she gets after something like this. Retreats to her corner of the Sanctuary and freezes the tits off anyone who tries to get close. But she’s dealing._
> 
>  _And...she wouldn’t want me to tell you, but I think you need to know. It meant a lot to her, hearing you’d been planning to come home. Like when Henry told her, she actually smiled. The real one, with the dimple and the shiny eyes._
> 
>  _So, you know, whenever you get over yourself, you might want to consider coming home._
> 
>  _We miss you, jackass._
> 
>  _Kate_
> 
>  _PS - Biggie says strawberry soda and blueberry pie. Whatever the hell that means._
> 
> So much for uncharacteristically close-mouthed.
> 
> Will sighs and rakes a hand through his hair. It’s better, it’s worse - he dips his hand in the fountain and watches the water drip through his fingers. Neptune’s dolphins stare down their smiling curved noses at him. They’re taunting him and they have been since Valentina asked him about them weeks ago; they’re on Kate’s side, but Will keeps trying to tell them, he’s really not up for another round of death and rebirth.
> 
> He _knows_ Magnus misses him and he misses her too, but she slept with Tesla instead of him and then she went and dyed her hair. How’s he supposed to go back when he still loses entire hours to the scent of violets?
> 
> It would be easiest to let it drop, but irresponsible. Kate’s not the only one who reads deep between the lines.
> 
>  _Kate,_
> 
>  _It’s all right to be hard on yourself, to remind yourself of the past and the mistakes you made. Holding yourself to account makes you better. It makes you strong. But you’re living your redemption. No one’s fiercer about doing what’s right now than you. So when you’re beating yourself up about how three years ago, it might’ve been your fault, don’t forget to remind yourself that it’s *not* now, and go and get Big Guy to give you a hug._
> 
>  _Yeah, yeah, you said don’t get shrinky, but if you can poke inside my head, you can bet I’m poking inside yours. Especially since you’re right, I’m sorry, that was completely a dick move. I *did* want to know how you were doing, but I should at least have admitted I was worrying about her too. It’s not like you didn’t know. Sorry, really._
> 
>  _Thanks for telling me what I wouldn’t ask. It’s fine to tell her I asked about her, if you want. Satisfy my curiosity on one point. When did she dye her hair?_
> 
>  _I miss you, too. You know I do._
> 
>  _Will_
> 
>  _P.S. Tell Biggie, blueberry syrup and strawberry shortcake._
> 
> Will gives up pacing and goes for a walk. It’s so late it’s early and a group of women are up in the Roma encampment down the lane. Relations between the Roma and the Sanctuary have grown strong in Will’s time here, and he’s proud of that. Proud that the Roma have started to trust the team with some of their secrets, and prouder that the team and Valentina have extended the Sanctuary’s protection to the Roma people in the face of the Italian government’s ID cards, incendiary bombs and fascist antiziganism.
> 
> He’s had some of the most amazing conversations of his life just over that rise, but tonight, today, this morning, Will can’t, he just can’t, face Donka’s knowing eyes and pointed finger and the story that explains some obscure point of his life, and his head can’t take the jingling shimmy and rattle of her necklace of stamped gold half moons and dangles. She lifts a cup and holds it out to him, but he calls a quiet, “Thank you. _Prego. Nais tuke._ No.” The Italian sounds right. His Romani might as well be gargling mouthwash, but in this case, it honestly is the thought that counts.
> 
> Donka drinks her tea alone and no one else is allowed to join him, but there are more than one hundred sets of eyes guarding his steps. Will might be traversing an emotional abyss on an inch-wide tightrope but physically he is absolutely safe.
> 
> The sun climbs the horizon, splashing the countryside and igniting the sky with glory-bursts of Roma gold and Roman red before Old City feedings are done and Kate has time to email again. That’s fine. Will’s not really waiting on her, not making a decision; he’s just avoiding lemniscates.
> 
>  _Will -_
> 
>  _Didn’t I say *don’t* get shrinky on me? Your head-shrinking privileges are totally suspended, man. No long-distance therapy. I hate that shit when you’re at home, but here, at least, it’s kind of your job._
> 
>  _Apology accepted. I shouldn’t bust your chops about her. It’s just...she misses you. Email her? It would mean a lot. I know. I *know*. But I still wish you would come home._
> 
>  _Kate_
> 
>  _P.S. Biggie says blueberry pancakes and strawberry lemonade. Oh, and I didn’t remember, but he says she dyed her hair a week after you left._
> 
> A week after he left, and she’s had Henry using an image filter since then.
> 
> Do not ask for whom the bell tolls...
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Magnus -
> 
> I’ve reviewed all the files. No one could have seen more than you did. It’s not your fault. Not Kate, not the Abnormals you couldn’t save, and not Dane.
> 
> Stop blaming yourself and get some sleep.
> 
> Will
> 
> ~*~
> 
> Magnus doesn’t answer his email any more than he did hers after the accident with the crystals. It’s how they communicate now, professionally reassuring words like fireflies, and falling stars, quickly fading light trails in the dark.

  


* * *

Old City’s dark when Ishmael pulls up outside the Sanctuary. Not Norway dark, not yet. Night on the ocean dark with randomly flickering streetlights like St. Elmo’s Fire. Will doesn’t need a torch or a sextant to guide him from here.

He’s not walking a driveway or a gravel lane, but the pathways of the heart.

On the ride over, he’d tried to imagine how it would feel. Not to see her, that he knew better than to try. But to be here, touch the brick he’d scraped his shoulder on during a game of flag football his second Thanksgiving, stand in the moon-cast shadow of the gargoyle on the roof where they used to sit and talk, hear the familiar sounds, feel the weight of the air. He’d thought...he’d thought it would be like going back to the U.K. Sanctuary now, profound quietude and peace.

But it’s not. It’s nothing like that at all. Old City Sanctuary creeps over him like a shadow on a lawn (or blood spreading over hard ground). Stealthy but not quiet, silent but not peaceful. It steals into his lungs, his heart, his jaw, his eyes with its ache and curls his fingers into self-warding fists. It should be a bad feeling, this neurotoxic assault, but it isn’t, it can’t ever be.

Even if he turns around and leaves forever tomorrow, Old City Sanctuary will always be _home_.

He lets himself in by the side door using Zviya’s codes (he emailed her first, she knows). His, it’s not arrogant to assume, will send up far too many alarms. Declan’s would occasion greetings at least, and any other House Head’s might cause a panic. He’s under no illusions _his_ illusion will last more the thirty seconds, but it gives him time to do one incredibly important thing:

Find the camera, look right in it, and lift a finger to his lips.

 _Please. Don’t._

He gets halfway to his room before a floorboard creaks, a shadow shifts, hair shushes across a shoulder. All three of them are there - Biggie’s the floorboard, Henry’s the shadow, Kate’s the hair, but Will stays his course and they don’t stop him.

Yeah, he misses them, and they miss him, but it’s never even a question.

Magnus first.

~*~

  


> Magnus isn’t out of commission, but Will _is_ back on domestic soil before she and Kate are recovered from their ordeal.
> 
> Someone’s opened season on Sanctuary heads of house without seeing fit to inform them. There have been three attempts in twenty four hours, the most recent in New York where Will is now. While Baton Rouge and Missoula escaped unscathed, Rae Bailey (Wexford’s replacement) took a 9 mm through the left chest that missed her heart but collapsed her lung and another through the right lower back that grazed the kidney. She’ll be back on her feet in a few weeks, but she’s beyond fortunate.
> 
> The police have ruled it gang violence (Rae’s an activist from way back, and she still does food distribution on the weekends in some of the worst neighborhoods), but Will knows within seconds of reading her charts it’s premeditated assault (and not attempted homicide). There’s nothing incidental about the placement of those two GSWs. Each missed being lethal by less than a centimeter.
> 
> That’s not an accident or collateral damage. It’s a message.
> 
> Will puts the entire Sanctuary Network on lockdown until he can decipher it. Yeah, _Will_ does, and Magnus is the first one to back him. Then Declan. Then Valentina. Then Nils. And every single Sanctuary House head he’s worked with in the last year and four months.
> 
> If the Grand Tour hasn’t helped him deal with lemniscates, at least it’s been good for his career (and probably for Magnus, but he’s trying not to think about how fast she was to back him and how much he misses being a team; it really doesn’t help with the lemniscate problem).
> 
> As the acting Head of House in New York, Will has massive resources at his disposal. Cars, planes, staff, coffers, and except for the staff (Nat, with her bubblegum pink hair and underutilized skills especially) he ignores it all. Wealth won’t help him solve the mystery, but if he’s reading the _I could take you all out_ right, it may help _re_ solve it.
> 
>  _I could’ve killed her but I didn’t_ is the message of Rae’s two GSWs, and since it’s right on the heels of the other two shootings (now that he looks, they’re _exactly_ eight hours apart), it reads backward to mean _I could’ve killed them too_. The _I_ isn’t the shooter. It can’t be. Even if the shooter had a private plane at his or her disposal, eight hours from Missoula to Baton Rouge, and Baton Rouge to Manhattan would be cutting it close. Not for flight time, definitely, but for setting up to take the shots and being sure there’d be shots to take (even if as it looks from the fact the Missoula Head of House, Lucy Monroe, had been on an unscheduled visit to sit with her father’s mother) “I” has or is a man on the inside, perfect eight hour increments and a single shooter is virtually impossible. The only teleporter he knows with that kind of patience prefers to kill his prey and to do it by hand.
> 
> So, multiple shooters, probably hired snipers. The miss on Lucy singed the end off a single, long, free-hanging braid, and the miss on Calvin James sliced out the handles on two recyclable grocery bags. _Good_ snipers, probably with their own agendas that mesh all right with the mastermind. Snipers means money to pay them.
> 
> Back around again to the message, then. Will might be misconstruing in attributing a single, male, _I_ to the planning. The boss could be female, especially a woman like Dana Whitcomb, head of a powerful organization opposed to the Sanctuary’s work, but that doesn’t make sense. Dana had already tried lopping Heads of the Sanctuary hydra or lopping Sanctuaries off anyhow, and failed, and anyone who’d worked with her would know that. Plus any other organization as powerful as the Cabal would’ve heard about it.
> 
> Ranna just _wouldn’t;_ Will knows that. But that doesn’t mean Hollow Earth and the Praxians couldn’t be involved, via Adam or Falon. Adam had been the root of a lot of their problems lately, but a sniper doesn’t feel like him. Falon would be a good candidate for something like this, using proxies to do her dirty work, but if she survived Adam’s coup attempts, she’s probably on the run without the resources.
> 
> Virgil St. Pierre comes to mind, but besides having helped them last year, he doesn’t fit the profile. St. Pierre’s a coward, but he’s also a scientist. He has far too much (grudging) respect for the work the Sanctuaries do to attack them like that, and why these individual House heads?
> 
> Will pages through printouts of the files while Nat sorts through them online, working with Henry via IRC. One House head after another, looking for connections beyond the Sanctuary. Kate’s out on the streets talking the talk, and Zvi’s searching memory crystals for recursive loops.
> 
> No one’s slept in two days when it finally dawns on him.
> 
>  _Get me everything you can on Dane._ Will jumps right into the middle of their IRC conversation without so much as a warning to Nat who’s lounging, half-awake, on the couch in Will’s office. The ping on her laptop startles her so badly, Will actually cringes and mouths, “Sorry.”
> 
>  _What kind of everything?_ Henry responds and then adds, _Kate wants to know how many bones she can break to get your everything._
> 
>  _If I’m right, there won’t be any bones to break._ Because the one consistent factor over the three cities that had been hit is a large Folding Man population. What that has to do with Dane, Will’s not sure yet, but the timing’s close and...
> 
> And Will’s got it in for the guy. He abandoned Magnus.
> 
> It’s possible he’s projecting.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> It turns out that Henry’s almost completely right about Dane, Will’s met eclairs made of sterner stuff than Magnus’s last protege, even though it takes Will awhile to see it past Dane being not only smart and interesting (dual degreed in sociology and biology with a specialization in itinerant populations and a tenure-track teaching position just down the street at CUNY) but also rugged model-pretty (square-jawed, tow-headed, tall and built, GQ in his black eyeglass frames). Will already didn’t like him. Now he just straight up hates the guy. It’s completely irrational, but looking at him makes Will’s jaw tense and his shoulders ache. He kind of wants to punch him on general principle.
> 
> Instead, he takes the coffee he’s politely offered, sits on the couch that’s too nice for a first-term city college professor, crosses an ankle over his thigh and makes conversation. He gets Dane to lower his defenses with stories of the Italian Romany, most of which are carefully temporized, enough truth to whet Dane’s appetite, but not enough to harm his friends even if Dane’s far more malicious and virulent than the ‘everything’ Nat, Kate and Henry fed him suggests.
> 
> Dane tells him about his work on the Folding People, what he’s learned about their culture, and how he imagines they’re a lot like the Romany as an itinerant Abnormal population. Will doesn’t correct his assumption about the Romany being Abnormals. They’re as human as Will, and probably Dane; the odd outlier here or there (and most of the pretenders) are Gifted, that’s all. It’s probably just pettiness on his part, but it’s also none of Dane’s business. And since Dane’s already made it clear he wants nothing more to do with the Sanctuary, it might keep them safe from Dane’s fetishizing brand of research. He’s a good scholar, Will decides, but he admires the Folding People and romanticizes their way of life, almost to the point of wishing he were one (at least until he got Kafka-ed; now, Will thinks, he’s not so sure).
> 
> He’s exactly the sort of person a guy like Malcolm Dawkins would have used, over and over and over again. Dawkins is dead, but Dane’s office is filled with extremely expensive things he shouldn’t be able to afford on the relatively small fortune his parents of record left for him when they died, according to Henry. According to Kate, word on the streets, however, Dane’s ‘uncle’ Adam Clunes is a big player in the Abnormal underworld (not the Hollow Earth kind of underworld, just the typical mafioso Abnormal underworld). It all fits with what Will’s seeing, but he’s got to shake the story loose from Dane, or wrapping this up’s going to take a lot more work.
> 
> So Will gets up and strolls over to the display shelves behind Dane’s desk. He runs a fingertip along the dust-free shelves and Dane swivels in his chair to watch, wincing when Will glad-hands an unassuming ceramic peacock, work in the FBI tells him is one of the most valuable pieces in the office. They’re still talking, and even though Dane blanches, he never protests, not even a word. Only someone who has things to hide acts like Dane is acting, trying to keep the conversation from turning personal or lasting longer than it has to.
> 
> Will steps it up and asks where the peacock came from. “Islamic, right? I mean, everything I know about art I learned from Art History 101 and tours of the Old City Sanctuary with Magnus in a good mood. But it looks kind of familiar.”
> 
> Features pinching briefly, Dane focuses up and to the right, not remembering but fabricating. Will can tell from the neurolinguistic cues before Dane spits out his bullshit story about diving off the coast of Sicily and sunken ships bound for Roger II Hauteville’s Cefalu.
> 
> “Huh,” Will says. He _really_ doesn’t like being lied to, especially not when peoples’ lives are being threatened. Not that he expected Dane to tell the truth, but his glib use of history offends Will. A year and four months later, he’s still channeling Magnus. That pisses him off too, and Will cocks his head, smiling almost politely but sharply as he turns; he knows the effect because he’s seen it on Magnus - lightning in a bottle. “You know, now that I think about it, I remember where I know that from. It looks _just_ like a piece from a shipment of artifacts for an exhibition at the Smithsonian.” He waits a beat and then adds, “They went missing on the way to D.C.” The same year Will almost caught up with Dawkins in Austin, and Dane’s lie is starting to fit all the pieces together.
> 
> “All right, yeah. It’s a knock-off,” Dane says, lying again, and this time he gives himself away with his fingers twisting a gold Cross fountain pen he’s probably never used. “It looks good, when the students and the committee comes in, you know?”
> 
> It’s almost plausible, except Dane hasn’t done his homework about Will. “Kind of like you, right? A knock-off.”
> 
> “I beg your pardon?”
> 
> Will’s the picture of casual and unassuming, peacock still in his loose-gripped fingers (it’s perfectly safe; Will spends hours palming baseballs while he reads), arms crossed mildly over his chest. He might be one of Dane’s students, except that he’s hunting now, and he has Dane pinned with his gaze. “A knock-off, you know, a fake, and usually not a very good one. I’m not sure how Magnus missed it, since she’s a pretty good judge of character usually. Unless--” Will cocks his head. “Ah, yeah. Not a knock-off. A wannabe.”
> 
> Dane’s manicured brows knit behind those dark plastic frames, clearly not tracking Will’s logic, but _worried_ about it. It’s all Will can do not to grin ferally. He doesn’t like being lied to, but he _really_ doesn’t like people who betray Magnus (he may be trying not to be in love with her, but he’ll never stop protecting her, he knows that now). “I’m not sure I understand where this is coming from,” Dane tries.
> 
> Not bad, as attempts at deflection go. Try to find out what’s got Will upset, get inside his head. Shrink 101, but Will’s not just a shrink, and he did learn interrogation at Quantico. “You thought, what, you could have it both ways? Get in, do the thing, no one would ever notice, no one would be hurt, and you could stick around and learn from her?”
> 
> Will doesn’t know what ‘the thing’ is or how it ties to the attempts on the House heads, but Nat found a super-sophisticated bit of spyware trolling the Sanctuary Network’s networks, and he’s pretty sure Dane’s got something to do with that. The computer on his desk’s not a Mac or a Windows machine that he recognizes. He snapped a picture of it while he was waiting, pulled up a few screens and snapped those too. He’s pretty sure he’ll have a text from Henry telling him it’s some kind of super-advanced, unhackable Linux build.
> 
> Meanwhile, Dane’s mouth twists and Will’s taking a perverse delight in the fact the guy doesn’t look so pretty now and he’s probably trying not to puke. It’s not like Will gets to be the bad cop very often. Let’s face it, he’s not much less of a cream-puff than Dane. Most of the time.
> 
> “It worked, you know. She liked you. Defended you to Tesla, even.” That stings, but Will swallows it and keeps talking. “So what happened?” Will studies him like he can see the telltales, leftover clinging bits of fungus from when Dane turned into one. He even reaches up with his free hand to rub the scar on the back of his own neck, like a reflexive nervous tick. Someone, probably Kate will have told him about the time the Cabal turned him into an Abnormal.
> 
> It’s heavy-handed but suggestive and Dane’s already pale skin turns a sickly shade of green. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”
> 
> Gotcha.
> 
> The rest of the story is convoluted. Dane was supposed to plant the spyware and inventory the Sanctuary’s ‘stuff’ to add to Clunes’s collection. In exchange, Dane would get full access to the Folding Peoples’ elders and history and Clunes dangled the right of publication, but ‘adopted’ Dane instead. For a keener cream-puff like Dane, a scholar in love with his subjects, the offer was irresistible. Magnus and the Sanctuaries are richer than Croesus. They’d never miss an artifact here, a Stenophelhabillis tusk there.
> 
> So basically, Dane’s Kate, with a different motivation, and much smaller balls.
> 
> Which still leaves the questions of who has opened season on the Sanctuary and why (and the somewhat less important - to everyone but Will - question of whether being an acting Head of House puts him in the line of fire).
> 
> The who, it rapidly becomes apparent, is Adam Clunes. The why...Dane tries to tell Will it’s because Dane turned on him and went over to the Sanctuary, and that might have ticked Clunes off, but Will doubts Dane’s _that_ important. If he cares about Dane so much, why take the risk of letting him join someone else’s team? Why let him leave?
> 
> Again, possibly projecting.
> 
> Will thinks, when all’s said and done, that Dane has been a pawn since the beginning, that Clunes never wanted the ‘stuff’ from the Sanctuaries. Like any boss, he has been establishing, expanding, redefining his territories, and Dane’s job has been to give him the means to mark walls with his gang sign, piss on fire hydrants, claim territories in carefully placed bullets and Rae Bailey’s blood.
> 
> The message has been for Will all along, intended for him and his Quantico training and profiling abilities to decipher and pass along. It is a claim of parity with the Sanctuary Network, a promise that if Magnus interferes with his operations, there will be no near misses when it comes to her.
> 
> Clunes is absolutely right. There will be no near misses when it comes to Helen Magnus, because all the inescapable lemniscates in the world can’t bind him if she’s in danger and by noon the next day, Clunes is in Sanctuary custody. Will’s to be precise. By five, Clunes has confessed to everything Will already knew, and by eleven the next morning, there is a deal in place that puts Clunes in a maximum security federal penitentiary for the rest of his (though not the rest of Magnus’s) life.
> 
> They offer to remove the ‘acting’ from Will’s job title that afternoon, and Tel Aviv calls at sunrise local. Will tells them both he needs time.
> 
> As it turns out, he needs exactly twenty one days and one violet, chrome and tea rose scented letter.

  


* * *

Every step toward his own room pulls the band around his chest tighter until his breathing is erratic and shallow. His fingers curl tighter around the strap of the bag he’s carrying, and this feels, oh god, so painfully familiar -

 _Gripping one bag that contains everything it mattered enough to carry, walking through a place he’s supposed to call home, toward an uncertain reception, full-knowing he could be leaving again tomorrow, adrift, with nothing but his bag again._

Except that the last time he’d done it, his voice hadn’t changed yet, Dad had been on the run again, and the bag had been plastic, shiny and black. It had mattered less then, too, because what was one more foster home, one more family that wasn’t his, one more group of people he’d never see again and wouldn’t care if he did?

Now he had a family and a home, but one wrong word could take them away forever.

 _Never._

* * *

Golden light pools from the half-opened door to his room, a slender finger of warmth beckoning to him across dark woods, Moroccan reds and Egyptian golds. It’s not out of the question that Biggie had time to turn on a light for him or sent someone else to, but like the light that amplifies the shadow, the gesture (if that’s what it is), serves only to heighten his existential dread.

His room, but her House. What if there is no ‘welcome home’?

Will has just about talked himself out of stashing his bag and washing up (again, he did on the plane and at the airport, nervous) when a quiet sound arrests him at the threshold.

He looks in.

Draped in flowing black silk, a tall, shapely woman stands with her back to him and arms wrapped around her waist. Her shoulders curve toward the window she looks out of, her head is slightly bowed -

Her hair is too dark.

 _Magnus._

Will has studied the hero’s journey. He has read _The Hero With a Thousand Faces_ not a thousand but at least a dozen times. He knows the name and shape of this moment, knows the archetypes, the stakes, and that he must cross this final threshold, descend into the belly of the beast, the spider’s web, Grendel’s lair, if he is to have a chance to emerge victorious.

He knows all this, Turner and Van Gennep, the Aeneid, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, and it is _complete crap_. It is all complete crap.

Nothing Will knows, nothing he has learned, not one year, five months, and fourteen days could’ve prepared him to see her again. Even so manifestly _wrong_ \- hair too dark and ironed flat, shoulders bowed, wearing black that isn’t a pencil skirt or leather - she stops his heart, steals his breath, kicks him (tranq darts him) in the balls, and reorients his world.

 _Forever. Unending._

 _Never._

Lips pressed tightly together, tongue caught between his teeth, he hovers at the door, hidden from view, and watches her. Her fingers alight on the pane, the curtains, the sill, his desk where she straightens a book he doesn’t remember leaving there; they flit from surface to surface, leading her, as they skim along the back of the couch, in a turn to profile that may as well have dropped him to his knees for the quick hitch and sag against the wall that keeps him hidden.

Her chin lifts, and, for a moment, he’s sure she’s heard him, but she moves out of frame. Any second, Will thinks, she’ll catch him playing peeping Tom outside a room that used to be his own, but he cannot take his eyes off her now. He shifts to bring her back into view.

Inexplicably, she sighs deeply and sits at the edge of his bed, and Will is entranced. Her hands rest between her thighs, then her head tips forward and they smooth aggressively at the black silk he has belatedly recognized for a robe. One lifts abruptly to dash at her cheek, and she spins crisply from where she sits to put her back to the door and curl up... on his bed.

Will’s paralyzed by hope. Immobile. Trapped at the exact center of his lemniscate.

And then her shoulders start to shake.

 _Oh god, Magnus._

The bag is dropped just inside the door which he shuts quietly behind him. She tenses and curls tighter at the sound. “If I wished company, I would have asked for it,” she bites out, and every forced-crisp syllable tears a strip off his heart.

After so long, he doesn’t trust himself to speak, but she needs him (even if she doesn’t know he’s here) and he goes.

She doesn’t look when the mattress dips under his weight as he sits in what had been her space. “Please. Leave,” she says and it is pure Magnus, icy command even through her tears, and Will _knows_ she expects whoever she thinks he is to obey.

Will has never been her yes-man.

He slides his hand through her hair instead.

In the split-second before her hand closes around his wrist, he is assaulted by the scent of violets in moonlight, tea rose on votive warmed water, timeless beauty reflected off polished chrome.

Her eyes are wide and shiny wet when they register whose wrist she holds. “Will?” she whispers, uncertain, and like him, it seems she doesn’t dare breathe.

“Magnus,” he answers, heart-stung with a year, five months and fourteen days of missing her.

 _”Helen.”_

 _“Huh? I mean, I know that’s your name but...”_

 _“You stopped being Dr. Zimmerman a long time ago.”_

“Helen,” he amends.

Before he even knows what’s happening, her arms are wrapped around his neck and she’s sobbing. Deep, desperate, wracking sobs that rock them both. Every tear that wets his shoulder (and there are so many of them, so unlike her) eats through the armor of his Grand Tour until he’s as raw as the day he left, and can’t think of a single thing to do to ease her except to pull her, soft and shaking, into his lap.

It seems impossible, but she curls closer, clings tighter.

Will’s terrified. Deep-down, soul-quaking, existentially _terrified_. There is nothing more frightening than getting exactly what you need, and he has needed to hold her for so long now. Since an afternoon spent fighting for survival below three thousand feet.

He’s not much taller than her and probably not stronger at all, but he cradles her close and pulls his fingers rhythmically through her hair. “Shhh.” It’s not a shushing sound, not meant to be, but a soothing one. “Shhh.”

Time passes; he has no idea how much. It strikes him as strangely perfect that he has no clue, when he can tell almost to the minute how long they’ve been apart. It’s just hard to think of anything with the woman he loves beyond breathing hurt and crying in his arms.

Eventually she quiets, sobs slowing to a long shudder and a shift to hide her tear-stained face. Will wants to kiss her. So much it aches. He cannot hold her close enough. She doesn’t try to move away, so he presses his lips to her hair and just...

Breathes.

It seems like forever, but it’s probably more like minutes when she breaks the silence to be so oddly formal and British, it almost makes him smile. Almost. “This is hardly the welcome I would have wished for you.” He’s already shaking his head, but she insists on adding, “I am sorry, Will.”

“One year, five months--”

“And fourteen days,” she finishes for him. To say he’s surprised is to call Kali a spider.

He thumbs the tears from her cheeks. “You never have to apologize for this.” Not for crying in his arms, not for letting him care for her, not for needing him. “Not for being honest.” For Tesla, maybe yes. But not for this.

“Are you home, then?” The hope in her voice is heartbreaking.

Will wants to say ‘yes’ unconditionally. He says, “That depends.”

She sits up straighter, still in his lap, and fixes him with that piercing gaze. “On what?”

Once, his answer might have been a quip, his mouth quirked and tone cheeky. Now, the same answer is solid, straight up, certain. “You.”

Magnus - and it is Magnus, no mistake, not her softer, boudoir twin - lifts an eyebrow at him.

“I gave you space and you let me think you slept with Tesla.” Whether she did or not, ever, he doesn’t know and it’s never really been the point.

That softens her again. “Will, please, let me--”

He shakes his head a little. He’s not done yet. “I’m not willing to let you run anymore. Either it’s ‘yes’ all the way, or it’s ‘no’. No half measures, no middle ground.” And he’s still not sure whether, if the answer’s no, he can stay.

Unexpectedly, she laughs. It’s a rough sound, hoarse from crying, but not at all bitter. She honestly sounds amused and her eyes threaten to sparkle with it.

God, he’s missed her. “What?” he asks, and it’s a bit edged under the circumstances, but he can’t help the smile trying to creep up on him.

She touches his face, cupping his jaw with one warm, soft palm. He falls in love all over again. “No one speaks to me like you do, Will. No one else tells me I cannot have my way. No one else in my long life has dared tell me ‘no, this is how it is going to be’ and expected me to go along with it.”

He has fallen so deep into her eyes, he’s missed until now the fact she’s untying her robe. Will cocks his head, both eyebrows screwing up as he stills her hands. “What are you doing?”

Another smile, this one more Mona Lisa. “Agreeing to your terms.”

Uhhhh... terms? “What terms?”

“As I understand them,” she begins, and, yeah, she’s definitely feeling more herself now. “You will stay if you can have me.”

Will frowns, then smiles a little sheepishly, then shrugs. “I wouldn’t have been so bald about it, but I guess so, yeah.”

The robe slides from her shoulders, pooling over his lap and the bed, an invitation far less subtle and much more appealing than a finger of light in the hall. “So have me.”

Now it’s his turn to laugh.

Her eyebrows sweep upward, in a deliberate echo of his, he’s sure. “What is it, Will?” she asks, and he answers, “I forgot how blunt you can be.”

Will’s forgotten a lot about her, even though, paradoxically, he remembers her down the slightest detail. Mostly he’s forgotten how his chest aches when he’s close to her and how the effort of not touching her, not tucking that one recalcitrant curl that refuses to stay flat-ironed back behind her ear, not sliding his hand up the line of her arm and across her shoulder to cup his hand around the exquisite curve of her neck, not catching her hip in the other hand to draw her flush, not kissing her...how the effort requires every bit of his will, leaving him tongue-tied and stupid around her.

“I could be more subtle, I suppose, but did you not just demand certainty? That there be, how did you phrase it?” she teases, as though she’s not perfectly aware that he can’t think past the ridiculously erotic disarray of one lock of too-dark hair lying at the join of her neck and her shoulders. “No half measures, no middle--”

Will kisses her.

It has suddenly dawned on him, finally penetrated the bittersweet fog of _Magnus crying in my bed_ , that _so have me_ means he no longer has to make that heroic effort not to do this, and Will --

Kisses Helen Magnus. Curls his hand around the back of her neck, sweeps his thumb along her jaw, seals his mouth over hers and just. plain. kisses. her. Like she’s any other woman he might be interested in. Like he hasn’t tried not to imagine this moment a thousand times with varying degrees of success.

Like she’s not everything he never dared to believe he - quiet, steady, reliable, incredibly dorky, freaky-eyeballed Will - could have.

His lips slide against hers or hers against his, and before the cocoa-mint sweetness of his grab-it-and-go Tiger Milk bar and her toothpaste, Will tastes the salt of her tears. Magnus makes a soft, yielding sound, nothing he has ever heard from her, and he is gone. Completely mindless with a year, five months, and fourteen days of trying not to think about her, two and a half years before that of trying not to want her, and a lifetime’s worth of love and pure, blinding need.

It’s good, he thinks dimly, that there are clothes in the way, his clothes, since she’s mostly naked, just that negligee and maybe matching panties, and he’s going to find out soon (oh god). It’s good, because otherwise he’d already be spreading her thighs to slide between them and he’s pretty sure she wouldn’t care. But if she wouldn’t care, then why is it a good thing again?

This is the state Will’s brain is in when he turns at the waist and presses her back to the bed. It may be the lack of oxygen, since their mouths are still fused, even when he comes up over her. It may be the lack of blood, since if he’s ever been this hard, he cannot think (recursively) of when. Or it may just be her, Helen Magnus, breathtakingly beautiful and brain-meltingly somehow, completely beyond comprehension, his.

She props herself up on her elbows, keeping her mouth where he can reach it, while he unbuttons his shirt and tugs it off. There’s an awkward moment after that, when she reaches to slide his t-shirt up, her fingers graze his bare skin, and it knocks the wind out of him, forcing him deeper into a kiss to borrow breath from her; they both topple backward and then getting the t-shirt off is much harder, and his jeans nearly impossible, because their bodies press full and he wants her.

He _needs_ her.

“Magnus,” he breathes, separating them for what he hopes will be only milliseconds. “Help me get out of these?” So he can get into her. That’s implied, he’s sure, and sure she’ll agree he should from the eager way her fingers attack his t-shirt again.

She peels it off him and then she’s kissing (ohgodMagnus) his neck and chest, fervently, and he’s on his own again. Somehow he manages to wiggle his shoes off and shuck his jeans, and he’d dither over the boxer-briefs but her hands are insistent, sliding beneath to grip his ass and pull him against her so there’s really no point, plus there’s the way she pleads, “Will, _off_ ,” and even if he wanted to resist, he couldn’t.

Somehow - Magnus’s hands are on his ass, he has no idea how - his underwear is worked down his legs and gets kicked aside, and then there’s the small (very small, almost a thong) matter of her black silk and lace panties and her negligee. For as small a matter as they are, they seem...insurmountable, and for a minute, he wonders whether they will actually do this, whether she will allow it, his goddess, whether she’ll let him worship.

His hands are full of her, his eyes are full of her, his heart...his heart is so full of her Will can’t breathe, or think, or speak. He can only skim his fingertips over the flat curve of her abs, eyes wide and eyebrows lifted, to ask permission to raise this last veil and part the last curtain.

“Please, darling,” she urges him, and ‘darling’ is such a Magnus word, he instantly loves it and grins a little before he kisses her again. He can’t stop kissing her and he thinks it will be a very long time before every tiny curve of her lips doesn’t make him want to taste them, crush them under his. Maybe it will be never, but that’s the right kind of never, a double negative that makes a positive.

Incredibly positive, powerfully positive, as in he is positive that he’s never touched anything as perfect as Helen Magnus, as the milk-soft skin of her breasts when he skims the black (too dark, too harsh, he prefers her in blue or red or rich, dark purple, don’t ask him how he knows, he just does) silk off her body and over her head.

Then he wants to look, but she’s pulling him down again. Seeking his mouth again. Scraping her fingernails down his back and gripping his ass again. “You’re beautiful, Magnus,” he tells her, raw not a strong enough the word for the sound of his voice. Maybe _shredded_ or _wrecked_. “So beautiful.”

She smiles, and he’s glad to see it. He’s waited a year, five months and fourteen days to tell her, at least, but honestly, much longer. And the smile...he has wanted that smile since he saved her life mouth-to-mouth, rebirthed her. He smiles, thinking he plans to do that again and again, kill and resurrect her, the little death, though, only that one.

“What is it, Will?” she asks, brows pinching a little in the middle. He kisses the tiny line between them as his thumb slides beneath the elastic of her panties to stroke her. She arches and whimpers, and he almost can’t answer, spelled silent by her cries.

“Nothing,” he manages, then reaches for his jeans for a condom. “I spent too long abroad.” _I missed you laughing at my jokes,_ he thinks but doesn’t share that one, not yet.

She must divine what he’s doing, because she reaches for his hand and pulls it back. “It’s all right.”

Will shakes his head. Putting someone at risk is a terrible way to say you love them, but he can’t bring himself to say the words. Helen Magnus is not some pretty girl he picked up in a bar or at a conference who’d offer something like that if it weren’t safe and she weren’t prepared for...oh holy shit, Magnus. “Uh...” Really eloquent, there, Will. “You sure?”

There’s _that_ look, and how anyone can manage to look beautiful, elegant, poised, and arch in half-skewed black lace panties, mouth wrecked from frantic kisses, and--

Why is he even thinking about this? “God, you make me stupid. I just...forget...how to tie my shoes when you look at me like that.”

“As well you don’t have to then, isn’t it?” she teases, and just like that, they’re back there again, when he’s wanted to be _there_ so long it’s surreal. He’s in a tangle of mouths and fingers and shins, kissing and grinding and rubbing their bodies together for friction like she’s any other woman, not _this_ one, who makes him completely insane.

There’s still that one maddening scrap of black silk and lace between them, and when they break for air again, he rolls them to their sides so he can slide them off of her. She whimpers when the damp (drenched, his fingers are slick; they’re wet again and rebirthing each other, recursively) silk comes away from her labia and Will conceives a desire to spend hours with his face between her thighs, learning the taste of her and hearing every pleasure sound his tongue can strike from her.

He’s thinking about doing it now, or rolling to his back and pulling her over him so he can watch her, but she slides her fingers into his hair again and reverses the direction of flow. “Have me, Will?” she whispers, no more taunting or teasing, no more chasing echoes and shadows and maybes, no more _catch me if you can_ or _missed me missed me_. Just truth.

Will _has_ missed her, and he’s caught her, and now he has to kiss her. Kiss her and have her and take her, bury himself in her, get lost and find himself again.

He presses into her, a long, slow glide while her fingernails tighten in his shoulders. Her chest lifts, rubbing the hard points of her nipples in diamond-scratch trails in his mind if not his skin, and her thighs splay, hips opening to welcome him. In and in until she’s wrapped around him and he’s sheathed in her. Their mouths open and they gasp together, draw breath together, in unison like sitting up in tanks full of psychic worm-spit glad to be alive--

“ _Will,_ ” she moans and tightens around him, close already, from four years of playground games.

“Me too,” he tells her, and shatters the crystalline moment to retreat and surge forward again, claim the yard she gives him with the inches.

There’s no thinking after that, recursive or otherwise, only the mental equivalent of scatting or riffing, an excess of need and longing and abruptly exuberant brilliant blue loop-de-loop lemniscates, spilled out through both their mouths in soft cries. Written by her fingernails in the tender skin along his spine and his thumbs in loving sweeps against her cheekbones and shoulders.

They aren’t movie perfect or endless. He misses the angle more often than not, they’re too desperate for each other to orchestrate orgasms. Eventually she comes when his thumb leaves her shoulder for her clitoris and writes its infinities there, and he comes when the pulses of her release approximate sine and cosine crossing - endlessly signed and cosigned in her keening cry and his silent shiver.

Their rebirth isn’t perfect. Birth isn’t. It’s messy and bloody and sloppy and wet. But it’s real.

It’s finally real.

* * *

“ _Will?_ ” Magnus’s voice is frantic, desperate in the dark, and she turns, reaching, grabbing, for him.

“Right here,” he promises her, hand smoothing through that shadow-polished hair and gathering her close. _Always._. “I’m right here.”

“ _Will._ ” She presses her face into the crook of his neck, breathing ragged and heart pounding against her ribcage so hard it beats in his chest. “I thought you’d gone. I thought--”

“It’s not. It’s not a dream.” His hand rubs down the long, elegant (naked, he’s still not over that, not by a long shot, how can he be? It’s _Magnus_ ) line of her back, soothing. Of course he knows what she fears.

Psychic worm-spit. Ultimately, Carentan. That someday, again, she’ll wake up alone.

It’s the first night of him doing what she hired him to do four and a half years ago. Hold her hand, hold her, when she’s afraid of the dark. Of course, she’s scared.

So is he. Psychic worm-spit. Nogitsune. Zviya’s memories and not his own.

“Kiss me?” she asks, and he does. They bump noses, their teeth clack, he feels her mouth curve in _that_ smile, the one that means he’s amused her, and then he finds his way. That shape he knows, and he’s missed it.

“I missed you laughing at my jokes,” he whispers to her, kissing along the line of her jaw the way he’s dreamed (the good kind) of doing a thousand times.

She lifts her thigh over his and hooks her ankle against the back of his knee. Will caresses along that soft, unbelievably amazing, beautiful length, and it might not be a dream, but he’s still not sure he hasn’t died. Isn’t dying.

She’s wet and open and offering. Um, yeah, from that slow, half-awake rock of her hips and that tiny whimpered, “Will, darling,” maybe not just offering, needing. She needs him. Helen Magnus needs _him._

“Oh god, Magnus.” Will groans and it sounds obscenely loud, louder than her moan as he tilts his hips to push inside.

Her fingernails score lightly along his spine and the back of his neck and he shivers, shudders, thrusts, and she stifles a cry in his shoulder, nips his throat, and murmurs, “Helen.”

“I missed you correcting me when I’m wrong,” he teases, grinning brightly at _Magnus_ in his room, his bed, his arms. “Helen.”

“Will you...tell me everything you missed, Will?”

If she weren’t wrapped wet and so unbelievably _right_ around his cock, if her ass (ohgod, it’s even better than he always thought) weren’t cupped in the palm of his hand, if they weren’t trying to punctuate every stroke with messy, greedy kisses, he’d have lots of words.

Now, in the dark, he slides his hand up her side to cradle her jaw and kisses her with everything he feels poured into it. When she whines again (most amazing sound ever) and drags herself down on his cock, he tells her simply, “Home.”

A few shared breaths later, he rolls to his back and pulls her up over him. It’s dark, so he can’t see, but he doesn’t need to to know she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “I missed home, Helen. I missed _you._ ”

She finds a rhythm that pleases her, slow, slow, slow, like waves against the side of a boat. The steady slap-slap-slap of wet flesh almost sounds like that, too. She’s in no hurry to come, and he’s content to touch and please her.

When she does finally, and he does, it’s better than before, less epic for not being a first, but sweeter for not being frantic. She curls down to him after without his softening dick sliding free.

“I missed you knowing me,” Magnus confesses to his shoulder, breath still hot and moist and hair a tangled wreck around his fingers. “I missed you every minute, Will.”

Will just holds on, a lot too tight, a little (or a lot) overcome. “Me too.” He shivers again when he breathes her in: purple-tea rose-chrome. “Me too.”

* * *

When he wakes again, Will still has no idea how long they’ve been together. His internal clock suggests it’s been about six hours, which makes it almost time for Magnus to be getting up. It’s a surprise, honestly, that she slept at all, and he feels a little goddess-blessed (even if he’s reasonably sure Kali never planned to share her herald) to be seeing her like this, relaxed and peaceful, the weight of the world having slipped away or at least lighter now for being shared.

His stomach rumbles, reminding him he’s had nothing to eat but a Tiger’s Milk bar for at least those six hours, probably more like ten, and two fairly epic innings, but he ignores it. This may be the only chance Will ever gets to _know_ he’s made her life better (he still doesn’t entirely believe ‘have me’ means more than this one night), and he’s not going to squander it on a trip to the kitchen or even as far as his bag to get another whatever supplies he tossed in there at the airport.

Magnus shifts in her sleep, rolling from her side to her back. There’s a flicker around her mouth, a soft, Mona Lisa expression that makes him think she might not be so asleep after all, but he lets her pretend because it’s endearing and because if she’s going to stay here with him when she could be working or doing anything else, Will’s not the idiot who will take away her excuse. Not for the world or a sky full of stars. Not for anything.

That little smile fades away, and her breathing evens out, the pool of light from the lamp they never turned out after the last time (didn’t want to be alone in the dark, not even for those few seconds before finding each other with fingers or lips) makes the contrast of the dark walnut of her hair against the perfect pale of the curve of her neck and breast all the more stark.

Will hates it. He hates it and everything he thinks it means. He risks rousing her to smooth a snarl and gets lost tracing the curves of ring curls formed in the sheen of sweat and she dreams on.

A little while later, his stomach gurgles. There’s a flicker around her mouth again and Will thinks he saw her open her eyes. She’s _too_ still the way people are when they’re being invisible, not when they sleep. This time, he smiles, kisses her shoulder, and goes back to finger-combing her curls.

They play this game until his stomach howls loudly enough that her hand flies to her mouth to stifle a laugh. “When was the last time you ate, my darling?” she says in this sexy, sleep-roughened voice that is, definitely, the best thing he’s ever heard. Especially the ‘my darling’ part. It’s archaic and a little bit twee, but he loves it. It’s perfect.

“Some time between getting a letter from you and getting off a plane in Old City?” he suggests, although he’s teasing.

“Will!”

He kisses her to stop the protest, and because he wants to. Thw surprise is that she wraps her arms around his neck and kisses him back. A bit later, he comes up for air and murmurs, “More like eight hours, I’d guess. But I don’t remember much of anything between smelling your perfume on that letter and seeing you in my room.”

“Don’t be daft, Will. You must remember what the letter said or you wouldn’t have--” The tiny little line appears between her brows and she frowns, just slightly, as though she finally heard him. “My perfume?”

Will nods and catches a lock of that too-dark hair between his fingers again. He flushes very slightly as he says, “Purple, tea rose, and chrome.”

“Purple is not a scent, my love.” She’s watching his fingers on her hair, but he’s trying not to pass out from that unexpected L.

“It is. It’s a flavor, too. Didn’t you ever have Dimetapp or a grape popsicle? They don’t really taste like whatever they’re supposed to taste like. They taste purple. Your scent is purple, too.” Yeah, he’s babbling. Will thinks he’s allowed. Helen Magnus just called him ‘my love’. “Purple for passion, sensuality, also resurrection but that’s going to take a little more explaining.”

She laughs again and rests her fingers against his stomach which hasn’t really stopped growling. “Later, you can tell me everything you thought while you were gone. I want to hear it. Now, I think we should feed you.”

Will pulls a face she probably last saw on Henry, age nine, when he didn’t want to go to bed.

“Tsk, you can hardly have me again in your current--” Before she gets the sentence finished, he’s out of bed and digging in his bag. “Will, what on Earth--”

Triumphant, he holds up two Tiger’s Milk bars and two -- he tips his head to read the labels -- two Triple X Acai Berry Vitamin Waters.

Magnus laughs and beckons him back to bed with the crook of two elegant fingers. “All right, you win. For now.”

He opens the orange and brown wrapper for her and unscrews the lid of her water. “For you, my lady.” Considering the state of his cock, it’s probably a good thing he skips the bow in favor of the posh-courtly accent. It’s silly enough without a bobbing hard-on.

She bites into the Tiger’s Milk bar and her nose wrinkles. She chews and chews and reaches for the water. When she sips it, her nose wrinkles further. It’s adorable and he’s transfixed. “How can you stand these bloody things? They’re dreadful. This isn’t food, Will, it’s torture.”

“On the other hand,” he offers calmly but with a hopeful little grin. “They mean we don’t have to see anyone else for a few hours?”

“Fine,” she agrees, beautiful blue eyes twinkling with laughter. How is he so lucky? “But you owe me a proper breakfast in bed.”

* * *

It’s not time for breakfast again, or even lunch, when the energy gained from first-generation protein bars gets expended in third or fifth or eleventh inning sex. Will’s lost count (sort of), or more to the point, he’s not sure how to count, by orgasms or penetrations or positions. He’s not even sure he should count, and he’s not that experienced with relationships but he definitely knows you don’t keep score. With Magnus, getting close enough for this is probably more like counting coup anyway.

They’ve lapsed into quiet again - it seems to come in waves, like their grief and their laughter - Will on his side next to her, rolled up on his hip, head propped on one hand, and the other brushes knuckles against her cheek while his fingers trace the curves of a bruise-dark curl.

Will must be frowning, because she lifts her fingers to his lips and traces the bow. He kisses them and she smiles, but it’s soft and heartbreakingly poignant. “You don’t like it,” Magnus suggests.

He kisses her fingertips. _I love you._ Funny, they haven’t said it yet. Will’s not sure whether it’s a lovers’ game of chicken or they just haven’t needed to. “You’re always beautiful.”

“Very smooth, darling,” she teases, but her eyes aren’t quite bright enough for him to laugh. “But it’s not what I asked.”

“Technically, you didn’t ask. You said. Which means I don’t have to answer.” Maybe he can distract her with pedantry. Sometimes it works.

“Will.”

Or maybe not. It’s not quite the basilisk stare, but it’s close.

“No,” he agrees finally and combs the hair away from her shoulder, back onto the pillow where the contrast it makes with her skin is at least less jarring. “It doesn’t suit you.” That’s better than _You look like Morticia Adams only gorgeous,_ he’s pretty sure.

Her hand caresses the side of his face, backward fingers catching the hair at his temple and tugging it lightly down. “As well it’s only semi-permanent, then.”

Will tries not to look too pleased, but his heart takes an entirely different meaning (completely positive, not an inverse lemniscate, a singularity in black, not never) than the one she probably intends.

Her smile is almost lazy, a sensually sated cat with her very favorite mouse. “What color would you prefer it, love, blonde?”

Letting out a quiet breath, almost a sigh for how beautiful she is, Will shakes his head once. “Blonde was for John.”

“Ginger, then? I did fancy the French titian.”

“Hot,” he agrees, but shakes his head again. “For fun sometime maybe, but that was for James.”

“You favor the chestnut.” Her smile broadens just a bit, and Will thinks he’s going to drown in it.

“It’s the you I fell in love with.” There, so easily said, he can’t believe the words are out, but he wouldn’t take them back for the world, not with that dimple flashing in her cheek. _Forever, Magnus._

“I love you, too, Will,” Magnus says, and it’s like everything Will’s ever wanted in his entire life wrapped up in five perfect words. She sits up, tugs him up and wraps her arms around his neck.

He smooths a hand over her hair again, straightening the crimps and snarls from hours and hours of more sex than sleep. “I never thought I’d hear you say that,” he admits and wraps his other arm more tightly around her. “Sounds really good.”

“You’re not quite right about the colors.”

It feels like a non-sequitur, but it’s Magnus so it’s probably an object lesson. “I love you,” he tells her, because it’s heavy on his tongue and in his brain, crowding his every thought. “I love you I love you--”

Magnus laughs and kisses him. “Yes, darling. I know.”

“I love you,” he continues, and then pauses, grinning on the upswell of joy. “What did I get wrong?”

“They’re all for me.”

Before he can say he knows, and explain what he meant, she lays her finger across his lips. He turns his head and nips it, then sucks it into his mouth. She laughs again. “Will, do be serious a minute!”

“Hm.” He doesn’t want them sinking into grief again, not when she’s all bright blue eyes, warm toned curves, and dimples. “Okay, but only one.”

Magnus sighs, shaking her head at him. “What am I going to do with you?”

“I have a few--”

After cutting him off with a quick kiss, she blurts out, “They were all for me. Besides being practical in Occupied France when they were looking for a cool English blonde, the titian meant I was finished with John. The chestnut was my goodbye to James...”

“And the walnut was for me,” he finishes for her, and she nods, softer again but not so sad.

“I never make them permanent right away.”

“But you were about to.” Maybe she did mean it exactly how he thought she did. His fingertips chase the sudden gooseflesh (of awareness, or deja vu or simple chill?) up her arm. “That’s why you sent the letter?”

“In part, but it’s not _so_ cut and dried.” An appropriate metaphor, given they’re talking about hair and the scent of violets. “I missed you terribly, Will.”

“I missed you so much. You have no idea,” he confesses into the loose curls of her hair.

“Trust me, darling. I do.” It’s soft, not chiding in the slightest, but Will is stricken, agonized suddenly by his guilt.

“I’m so sorry. I never meant--”

“Shh. What’s past is past, and you’ve come home to me now.”

“I’ll make it up to you. Every one of those five hundred--”

“And four--”

“Days.”

They both smile, a little fragile, but the mood swings should be less manic from here. The pendulum is slowing under the weight of important words.

“How will we begin?” she asks, just a little bit tentative.

Inspiration strikes, a fantasy and practicality combined and intertwined, a fading lemniscate. He gives her a little tiny quirk of a grin as her gathers a handful of her hair and lets it spill through his fingers. “Just how semi-permanent is semi-permanent?”

Bemused, Magnus arches a slender eyebrow at him. “Six to eight washes, thereabouts.”

His grin brightens and sharpens as he rolls out of bed to get her robe (and, later, his). “Uh huh. And how many has it been?”

* * *

Magnus’s bathroom is maybe a palace, or at least a shrine. It’s fitting, he guesses, that she has marble (even porphyry; purple, of course) and cut crystal, beeswax tapers and polished chrome here in her antechamber, the inner sanctum of her inner sanctum, and in no way surprising. What’s surprising is that the goddess lets him in her beautification chamber at all.

“You’re not going to turn me into a stag, are you?” he teases when she drops her robe again, while he’s reaching in to the shower to turn it on.

“I’m hardly maiden, Will. Selene perhaps, or Hecate, but not Artemis.” He waits for the almost obligatory ‘your humanity is quite safe with me’ and when it doesn’t come, wonders if she left it off on purpose. She did give the Five the Source blood, but not Adam.

“I think I’d rather be Endymion then a Lampade,” Will answers her and tries not to think about transformations (rebirth, butterflies...Psillobars). He’s not sure he’d want to ‘live forever among the stars’ as it were, or find out he’s a latent vampiris sanguinis. But he’s absolutely positive that Tesla’s not the only one who’s gone back to search for the blood of Afina and her court. Some of them might even have lived.

“Endymion’s not a bad fit for you, darling. You are quite a beautiful man--” Will’s cheeks go pink. He’s not bad, he doesn’t think, but beautiful’s definitely pushing it. “Even if you aren’t as naked as I’d expect from him.”

Will strips off his robe and his socks (it’s cold; the Sanctuary’s drafty even when your balls aren’t hanging out), and steps into the shower. That’s about when it hits him, _really_ hits him, or maybe hits him the first time for the fiftieth time (because somehow he feels like it’s going to be the first time every time for as long as _so have me_ lasts), that he is naked with _The_ Helen Magnus, and not just naked but wet and naked (wet’s not that unusual with all the rebirthing), and they are calmly bantering about which myths they most approximate while his hands glide over her wet skin and he never has to stop the inappropriate next thought at being wet with her again.

This is why it will be the first time every time, because the instant he realizes it, the instant the scales fall from his eyes and he _sees_ her, all of his synapses fire at once and he cannot make sense, even inside his own head. Every thought is recursive, looping back on itself - a lemniscate.

“Do you do that on purpose?” he finally scrapes together two brain cells to ask around a grin that has to be absolutely dopey.

“I suppose that depends on what _that_ is, Will,” Magnus asks and looks vaguely perplexed, brows tightening and lips suggesting, just suggesting, a frown, as she reaches for her shampoo.

“Short-circuit my brain,” he answers distractedly, because he’s gotten lost along the upcurve of her breast and her lifted arm and his fingers reach out to confirm the shapes.

Magnus laughs, definitely at him, but strokes the side of his face and he’s helpless not to tilt his head into it. He craves it, that one particular touch, never forgotten; her first movement after the first time he killed and rebirthed her. It was the first, the actual first, time it hit him that she loved him too. “I should as soon ask if you do that on purpose.”

“Do what?” Will asks and then shrugs, “If it’s trip over my tongue, the answer’s no. Otherwise, probably yes?”

“Make me feel like the most desirable woman in the universe.”

“Yes.” Will nods vigorously. Comically so, and intentionally. “Definitely yes. I mean, I try, anyway. Yeah.” She smiles and he takes the shampoo from her. “Now, turn around.”

For once in her life, Magnus does exactly what he tells her, without question or comment, or even pause; she turns and puts her back to him. He threads an arm around her waist and pulls her against him. “You _are_ the most desirable woman in the universe, seriously. You’re amazing,” Will tells her, a soft, slippery murmur of wet lips brushing against the hot wet slope of her neck.

There’s actually a streak of dye-bleed there, and while she’s busy protesting, “That’s quite enough flattery, even for me, Will,” he’s rubbing her nape clean and watching the water run clear.

* * *

Four vigorous washes later, the frothy white suds on his hands and forearms are still tinted with dark brown and the water’s been cold, then lukewarm, then arctic, then lukewarm again. Even the Sanctuary has limits to how much hot water it stores.

“Darling.” She turns to face him, fingers pruned where they alight on his shoulder. Somehow they’re still graceful and elegant, beautiful and poised like the rest of her, even though she’s half-drowned.

“Yes, goddess?” Will smiles loop-de-loopily at her, upraised eyebrow, ‘darling’ and all. He can’t help it. Half the fantasies he hasn’t let himself have about her started with her being wet and looking at him like that.

“Really, Will? Goddess?”

“Precious? Princess? Pumpkin? Pookie?”

Magnus rolls her eyes but she’s laughing and that makes it all worthwhile. He settles again, running his soapy hand up her arm, and kisses her softly because it’s been at least five minutes since he did it last.

“You make a very persuasive case,” she breathes against his mouth, husky-warm and half-melted now, instead of half-drowned.

“Case for?” He wraps his arm around her hips and she melts the rest of the way. Yeah, that’s never not going to be awesome.

“Staying in the shower somewhat longer. I was going to suggest we turn off the water and let the others have some.”

“It’s the middle of the day.” The conversation’s pro forma at this point. Magnus has slipped into his arms, and the water has somehow gotten hot again. He suspects Biggie may be rerouting it, but he really doesn’t want to think about that. Not with him getting hard against her water-warmed hip and his mouth skimming the tendons of her neck. “Anyone else who’s taking a shower got slimed and is in decon,” and it runs on a separate, heavily filtered tank.

“Another...very -- oh _Will_ ,” she sighs out when he sucks the rivulet of water off the tip of her nipple and it tightens against his tongue. “Persuasive point.”

Her fingers thread into his hair and somehow he ends up on his knees. Not that he has any objection to being on his knees for her whether he’s Endymion or some nameless devotee or just plain Will. Especially when she’s agreeable about lifting one thigh over his shoulder to offer herself for his worship.

Over and over and over, his tongue sweeps deliberate figure-eights around her labia and clitoris. His knees ache from the tile and he’s so hard he throbs (again, it’s like he’s sixteen again and she’s a passing breeze), she clenches so tight around the fingers fucking her his knuckles bruise each other, but the small pains make the pleasure so much sweeter.

Of all the fantasies Will hasn’t let himself indulge on the long cold sleepless nights without her, this one’s the most pervasive. Losing himself in the feel, taste, _scent_ of her while he loves her in ways that are all about her, about caring for her, about making her feel good and forget the hurt and the hard things for a little while. Losing and finding himself again in her, a sexual reenactment of their history.

It’s fitting, Will thinks (to the extent that he _can_ think; his face is buried in Magnus and she is _actually_ , sensually and concretely, his whole world), that the first time he performs this particular service and they come together, her clenched around his fingers, his hand wrapped around his cock, his face is wet not just with her but with the waters of yet another (dark chestnut) rebirth.

* * *

When they do finally relinquish the water supply to other, more pressing, uses, they linger over thorough towel drying, watching their reflections play in the vanity mirrors, and there’s a chancy moment when she almost ends up ass on the counter, legs around his hips. They catch each others’ eyes in the mirror and burst into laughter at being hornier than teenagers.

It’s been a long time building. Will figures they deserve it. But he’s so hungry now that he’s lightheaded and he’d rather let her go to her work before she pulls away than wait for the sting.

He lifts her fingers to his lips and kisses them. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less, but I should go get dressed.”

She caresses his cheek, a slow lingering touch, eyes kindled with still fading laughter. “Come back for me when you’re done, love?”

Sometimes with her, it’s the littlest things. Now’s one of those times. _Come back for me_ not _I’ll see you later_ or some equally sweet but meaningless brush off in favor of work.

She wants him to come to her here in her bedroom, not in her office.

Will grins, hopelessly enchanted with her. “Yeah, you bet.”

Of course, actually leaving her bedroom (after sprinting through the halls barely dressed several hours ago) takes a lot longer. There are kisses to give and ridiculous, playacted longing looks, and fare thee well my ladies, and Magnus laughing, swatting him and shoving him backward through the door.

Eventually, though, he returns to where he found her last night. For the first time, he is alone with his thoughts. The shrink in him isn’t surprised when he stalls, pulling on a sock, or when a moment’s pause almost breaks over into tears, but it seems wildly inconsistent with the bright, bold joy he also feels even if he knows the cause.

Probably, he should take the time to grieve and process before he rushes back to her, but a year, five months and fourteen days wasn’t long enough to forget her, and fifteen minutes one way or another won’t be long enough to remember and come to terms.

Will dresses in jeans and a slate blue button down shirt. Not the t-shirt he left home in, and not a uniform, just the Will he’s become. He tucks his hands into his pockets after he shuts the door to his room and tells himself it’s stupid to worry about seeing her again when they’ve barely been apart. It’s stupid to be nervous.

He is anyway, heart pounding, palms sweating, towel dried hair sticking up here and there from running his hand through it again and again when he loops back on his path, recursively returning not just to her room but her. Before he knocks on the door, he swallows hard, checks his breath, does all the dumb first date things even though it’s not a date and if it is, it’s not really the first, except in all the ways it is.

Nerves fade at the beautiful, soft smile that greets him when she opens the door. “Hello, darling,” she says, winks, and reaches out to smooth down his hair.

Hers is nearing the right color again and not flat-ironed down but half pinned up with loose, healthy curls. She’s wearing a purple blouse with her black jacket and skirt. He fingers it, slipping his fingers between the buttons to touch her skin. When he lifts his eyebrow in question, she teases, “Sensuality, passion, resurrection and rebirth. Ours together. Easter colors seemed fitting.” He looks closer and finds she’s wearing topaz jewelry and his eyebrows lift higher. “Leo XIII liked to mix theology with his lifelong passion for the sciences. He was terrible company, but I was fond anyhow. One of the last of the lycans before you and Henry found Erika and all.”

Will laughs and shakes his head. “Of course he was.” She’s his Magnus again. God, he’s missed her so much. “I love you, Magnus.”

She grins and hugs him, a simple hug, from both mentor and lover. “Welcome home, Will.”

 

 

~~~~*~~~~

They go down together, not holding hands or anything, but to Will, at least, as they pass portrait after painting after case after window with their gleaming glass, it’s obvious that something has changed. That they have.

It surprises him a little how obvious it is, and that she lets it be. He’d expected _so have me_ to take months to trickle down. But when they find the others, not in the office, but in the living room theatre, she steps even closer to him. Looks to him and smiles.

Declan’s sprawled on the couch and Kate’s sprawled all over Declan. Henry’s bringing tea to some-- Erika. Will quirks a little grin at Magnus and wonders when that happened (again).

Before he can say hi, he gets clapped in the back of the head and swept up into a giant Bigfoot-not-bear hug. He can’t remember if Biggie’s ever hugged him before. Kate, Henry, yeah, but him? Not that he can remember. It’s like Biggie knows, he’s known all along and was waiting for this, for Will to be who he’s supposed to be before he would.

His eyes sting and Magnus rests her hand at his lower back, but Biggie’s huffing, “Hnn, hnn,” at the others who haven’t noticed them over the explosions on the screen (Kate’s choice, obviously). Before Magnus can even say anything or he can, Kate bounds off Declan and into his arms.

“Welcome home, jackass. Don’t ever leave again.”

He laughs, says, “I missed you too--” shoots Declan, who’s getting up, a sharp smirk but doesn’t call her ‘Katie’, just “Sis,” instead.

She makes a face, punches him, and Declan sweeps her aside (half into his arms, Will sees the love there, and wonders if Magnus does) to clap him on the shoulder. “About time, mate.”

The hug runs the other way this time, Will to Declan. There’s a quiet, for his ears only, “I owe you everything, man.”

Erika waits for them to be done to say a quietly polite, “Hello, Will. It’s good to see you. You’ve been missed.”

“You, too, Erika.” It’s sincere. He likes her a lot, whether she’s with Henry or not.

Henry, meanwhile, is looking from Will to Magnus and back and forth, trying not to drop the tea.

“Henry,” Erika prompts and holds her pale slender hands out toward him.

“What? Oh. Yes, tea. Here.” He practically shoves it at her. Fortunately, she’s by far the more graceful of the two.

Everyone laughs. Everyone, even Magnus.

Henry’s still staring, eyes as wide as when he’s wolfy. “Wait. Wait. _Wait._ ”

Magnus says patiently, “Yes, Henry?”

He wrinkles his nose. “You too? I mean, I knew about him, but...” Henry shakes his head and mock-glares at Will. “You hurt her, I kill you, we’re clear?”

Over Magnus’s shocked, “Henry!” Will is laughing and reaching out to take a smack at Henry.

“Dude!” Henry screws up his face and pulls back.

“Dude,” Will agrees.

“Ahem.”

This much hasn’t changed. When Magnus clears her throat, _everyone_ stops talking. All attention is on her, including his, especially his, always his.

“Effective immediately, I’m stepping down as head of the Old City Sanct--” She holds up her hand when they start to interrupt and they all subside again. It’s like a Catholic mass, and she’ll always be the pope. “Uary, thank you. I will continue as Head of the Sanctuary Network, Will is Head of this House.”

He blinks, startled. It’s not something he expected, but it feels right. “I--”

Magnus purses her lips, and Will’s pretty sure he’s going to die if he doesn’t kiss her. “Also effective immediately, assuming you’re amenable, darling, we’re taking a week’s vacation.”

In a single breath, with a single word ( _darling_ ), everyone else disappears again, more or less. His gaze locks in to hers, he lifts a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. She flushes slightly pink but doesn’t step away, and Will just smiles at her and breathes, breathes _her_ , the perfect blend of sensuality, innocence, and strength.

“Sorry, Kate,” he says after a minute, but his gaze never wavers from Magnus’s. “You’ll have to do without me a little while longer. Boss’s orders.”

To Magnus, he answers softly, “Of course I am.”

Amenable. To her, to being with her, to being hers. He always has been. And now he always will.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

**Author's Note:**

> A long time ago, I asked for prompts for "short Will/Helen porn." Someone suggested "crying Magnus denies crying and wants to make love instead." Somehow, that prompt, a lot of walking to Konami's Walk it Out and the terrible Jesse McCartney song, "How Do You Sleep?", and my tragic love of Sarah McLachlan's "I Will Remember You" (from which the title is taken) combined with everything I ever learned in graduate school to make this behemoth.
> 
> So many thanks to [Kageygirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kageygirl) for early beta and handholding, [Cerie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/cerie) for some really encouraging read-along, [Silensy](http://silensy.livejournal.com) for keeping me honest about the writing, and most especially [Callie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie) for never ever letting me quit. A different kind of thanks to [Oparu](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Oparu) for a great beta that found the big hole in this story and made me fix it.
> 
> I love you guys.


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